CME Group Q2 Earnings Call Highlights

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CME Group (NASDAQ:CME) reported record second-quarter revenue and near-record trading activity, while executives used much of the company’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call to address investor questions about perpetual futures and outline a slate of new product launches.

Chairman and CEO Terry Duffy said second-quarter average daily volume was 29.8 million contracts, the second-highest second quarter in the company’s history and within 1% of the record set a year earlier. He said May and June were particularly strong following a difficult April comparison. Open interest ended the quarter up 8% from a year earlier and 16% since the start of 2026.

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Duffy also said CME delivered record capital efficiencies, saving customers an average of more than $95 billion in margin per day. He said 94% of CME’s first-half volume came from institutional customers, a figure he used repeatedly to frame the company’s response to questions about perpetual futures.

Revenue Hits Second-Quarter Record

Lynne said CME generated more than $1.7 billion in revenue during the second quarter, up 1% from the same period in 2025. She said that marked a second-quarter record and the company’s second-highest quarterly revenue total ever, behind the first quarter of 2026.

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The average rate per contract was $0.678, up $0.026 from the first quarter. Market data revenue rose 20% to $238 million, which Lynne said extended CME’s streak to 33 consecutive quarters of year-over-year market data revenue growth and marked the eighth straight quarter of record market data revenue.

Adjusted expenses were $521 million, or $412 million excluding license fees. Adjusted operating income totaled $1.2 billion, producing a 69.5% adjusted operating margin. Adjusted net income was $1.1 billion, and adjusted diluted earnings per share were $2.99, up 1% from the second quarter of 2025. Lynne said the adjusted net income margin was 63.4%.

CME returned $1.2 billion to shareholders in the quarter, including $468 million in regular quarterly dividends and $695 million through share repurchases.

For the first half of 2026, Lynne said volume was 10% ahead of the prior year, revenue increased 8% and adjusted diluted earnings per share rose 10%. She also said July volumes to date were tracking 18% ahead of the prior year.

Executives Push Back on Perpetual Futures Concerns

Duffy said recent discussion of perpetual futures had overshadowed CME’s business performance. He argued that although the products are often described as futures, they function more like leveraged spot instruments and are not substitutes for the institutional hedging tools used by CME’s core customers.

“Perpetual futures are in no way substitutes for the institutional hedging tools that these customers rely on,” Duffy said. He said the products do not provide price or time certainty, which he called necessary components for hedging exposures.

Duffy said CME has the technical and operational capabilities to launch perpetual futures and has contract specifications ready if customer demand or market structure changes justify it. However, he said the company has not heard demand from its core customers. In response to a question from Jefferies analyst Dan Fannon, Duffy said he had spoken with senior executives and derivatives users at major institutional participants, including a large commercial energy firm, and was told they did not want CME to list the product.

Tim added that CME’s cryptocurrency business has continued to grow even as crypto perpetuals have existed outside the U.S. He said CME’s suite of cryptocurrency futures and options was up 44% in the first half of 2026 compared with the first half of 2025, and up 76% in June from a year earlier. He said CME was seeing between $4.5 billion and $6.5 billion per day in trading across its cryptocurrency complex, compared with about $270 million at a Bitcoin perpetual product introduced by Kalshi in July.

Duffy also raised concerns about whether perpetual products should be classified as swaps, citing the exchange of payments through funding rates. In response to Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Bedell, he said CME believes its litigation will show that such products are swaps, not futures.

New Products Include Crypto, Gold, Single Stock Futures and Compute Futures

Duffy highlighted several product initiatives, including 24/7 trading for crypto futures, 24/7 trading for CME’s one-ounce gold contract, Single Stock futures, Treasury Link and Compute futures.

He said Single Stock futures are scheduled to launch the following week and will simplify directional trading with capital efficiency. Duffy acknowledged that Single Stock futures had failed in an earlier market cycle but said timing is important and that current market conditions make the product more relevant.

Tim said CME’s equity complex has shown momentum, with second-quarter average daily volume of 8.6 million contracts, up 13% year over year. He said June equity volume was 10.1 million contracts, up 54% from a year earlier, while July volumes were running about 40% to 50% above July 2025. He also said the new Single Stock futures will be financially settled against the closing print of each Stock.

Julie said retail brokers globally were “extremely excited” about the Single Stock futures launch and described the product as a significant retail growth catalyst. She said more than 35 retail partners were targeting readiness for day-one or week-one activity.

Duffy and Derek Sammann also discussed Compute Futures, which CME plans to launch in partnership with Silicon Data later in 2026. Sammann said the product will be a daily benchmark tracking the spot hourly rental cost of NVIDIA H100 GPUs. He said the contracts are intended to provide price discovery and risk-management tools for data centers, AI labs, cloud providers, asset managers, banks, energy firms, hedge funds and professional trading firms.

Market Data, Prediction Markets and Treasury Link

On market data, Julie said CME’s second-quarter revenue benefited from pricing, professional subscriber growth, derived data revenue and growth in simulation trading device accounts. She said professional subscribers rose 3.5% quarter over quarter, while simulation trading device accounts were up 56% year over year. The quarter also included about $7 million in audits and catch-up payments for prior periods, compared with $3.8 million in the first quarter.

Asked about prediction markets, Lynne said CME has handled about 525 million event contracts since launch, including about 48 million contracts related to market events. She said more than 140,000 accounts traded event contracts during the quarter, up about 13% from the prior quarter, and average daily volume was above 4 million, up about 40% from the first quarter. Duffy said CME is being careful about its product set and repeated his view that some sports-related prediction markets resemble gambling.

At the end of the call, Duffy asked for additional commentary on Treasury Link, a planned fourth-quarter 2026 offering. Mike said Treasury Link will enable centralized spread trading between Treasury futures and BrokerTec cash Treasuries on CME Globex, using FX Link technology. He said the product is designed to connect two major U.S. Treasury liquidity pools and reduce execution lag risk in cash-futures spread transactions.

Duffy closed the call by emphasizing CME’s institutional base, capital efficiencies and product pipeline, saying the company remains focused on expanding its marketplace while maintaining protections and market integrity.

About CME Group (NASDAQ:CME)

CME Group Inc is a global markets company that operates some of the world's largest and most liquid derivatives exchanges, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and COMEX. The firm offers futures and options contracts across a broad range of asset classes — including interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural commodities and metals — and serves a diverse client base of institutional investors, commercial hedgers, brokers and retail participants.

The company's core services include electronic trading on the CME Globex platform, central clearing through CME Clearing, and distribution of market data, indexes and analytics.

This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected].

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