SEC Opens Comment Process for Binary KPI Options
The SEC has opened a comment period for NYSE Arca and NYSE American proposals to list binary KPI options, which would settle based on issuer-reported financial and operating metrics.
NYSE Arca filed its proposed rule change on September 3, 2026. Two weeks later, on September 18, the SEC published a notice soliciting comments on the NYSE Arca proposal in the Federal Register. The NYSE American notice landed the same day.
The contracts are European-style, cash-settled, binary. A call pays the exercise settlement amount if the underlying KPI lands at or above the strike at expiration; a put pays if it comes in below. Miss the strike, collect nothing.
Settlement references whichever KPI the issuer disclosed in an earnings-related Commission filing on the applicable expiration date — Form 8-K, Form 10-Q, and Form 10-K all qualify. A subsequent restatement doesn’t reopen the contract. Whatever number the issuer reported on that specific date is the number the contract settles against, permanently.
The filing names four companies as illustrative examples: Apple, Inc., Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Alphabet Inc., and Amazon.com, Inc. Across those four, the notice lists 19 proposed KPI examples — six for Apple, five for AMD, four for Alphabet, four for Amazon.
NYSE Arca already lists binary return derivatives under existing rules. This proposal extends that same framework to issuer-reported operating data rather than return-based triggers. The NYSE American filing moved in the same September 18 publication cycle, though the available record doesn’t establish the full KPI list or detailed terms for that exchange.
A comment notice is not an approval. No contracts go live as a result of this publication. These proposals sit inside the rulemaking process until the SEC acts, and the timeline for that action isn’t set.
The comment period opened September 18, 2026.
Nadia Rahman
Nadia Rahman is CoinScoop's Markets Editor. She covers Bitcoin, macro liquidity and the spot-ETF complex, and previously reported on rates and FX for a global newswire.