First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff What do these people have in common?: Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Circle, Jeremy Allaire; Vice Chairman, CEO and Board Services at Korn Ferry, Alan Guarino; Chair and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, Jeff Sprecher; industry pioneer, Dr. Richard Sandor; Chair of the Board of Directors […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from deploying hundreds of federalized National Guard troops to the Chicago area, a rare setback for his administration’s expansive view of presidential power, Andrew Chung and Jan Wolfe of Reuters reported. The justices left in place […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Michael Selig was sworn in yesterday as the 16th Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Former Acting Chairman, Caroline D. Pham, announced her departure as of yesterday, December 22, 2025. Pham had served since April 14, 2022, when she was sworn in as […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff I don’t usually report price news, but when gold and silver are both at all-time highs, it is a macro concern. Robin Paxton and Preeti Soni of Bloomberg reported that gold and silver have surged to all-time highs amid a confluence of supportive factors, with […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Congratulations to the new CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, who was confirmed by the Senate yesterday. Also, congratulations to Acting Chairman Caroline D. Pham on a successful transition and on her new position with MoonPay. I wish you both good luck in your new endeavors. The […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff The US options market is currently experiencing a significant surge, heading toward a sixth straight year of record volume, primarily fueled by a boom in retail trading. This widespread participation marks a dramatic shift from earlier decades when options trading-including the “adrenaline of open outcry”-was […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Clutch your Treasury certificates, folks-the DTCC has decided it’s time to drag U.S. Treasury securities into the blockchain era, partnering with Digital Asset and the Canton Network to tokenize DTC-custodied Treasuries on a live blockchain network. Following the SEC’s No-Action Letter blessing this digital transformation, […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Hold onto your limit orders, folks-Europe’s retail traders are ditching their contract-for-difference security blankets and charging headfirst into the futures and options markets. According to a new study from Acuiti, nearly four in five European retail brokers that currently don’t offer futures and options are […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff The SEC didn’t just change its mind about crypto, it changed its entire spine, abandoning cases and freezing litigation the moment Trump returned to power, as if someone had flipped a switch marked “investor protection off.” A New York Times investigation by Ben Protess, Andrea […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff U.S. and Chinese regulators are taking sharply divergent paths on tokenization, underscoring a deepening policy split over how real-world assets should interact with blockchain technology. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission has issued a no-action letter to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff FIA Board Chair and former kilt-wearer Alicia Crighton is testifying at today’s House Ag Committee hearing on reauthorizing the CFTC. Here is a snippet from her statement to the CFTC: “As more retail leveraged transactions enter CFTC markets, Congress should consider safeguards for institutional investors […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Is it time to buy a burner phone and create an anonymous social media account? The Trump administration has proposed requiring visitors from visa-waiver countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia, to disclose five years of social media history as a mandatory part […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Paul Georgy, co-founder of Allendale, Inc., a commodity trading and research firm, and a longtime member of the NFA board representing introducing brokers, has passed away at the age of 74. Georgy was a longtime customer of RJ O’Brien, which posted a moving memorial to […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff The major outage at CyrusOne’s data center in Aurora, Illinois, that disrupted global trading for more than 10 hours occurred after staff failed to follow standard cold-weather procedures, the company confirmed, according to Bloomberg. The error stemmed from improper draining of cooling towers ahead of […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Polymarket is moving to hire an in-house market-making team that will trade directly against its own users, a strategic shift critics say could transform the prediction platform into a de facto sportsbook and introduce serious conflicts of interest, according to reporting in Coindesk by Oliver […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff NIBA, or the National Introducing Brokers Association, held its annual meeting at the Union League Club of Chicago yesterday and elected its board of directors and officers. The officer corps was reelected to their current positions, including Ryan Griffeth (Optimus Futures) as president, Steve Petillo […]
Read articlea First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff LSEG is partnering with OpenAI to launch a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector that lets ChatGPT users with LSEG licenses pull and analyze LSEG financial data and news directly inside ChatGPT, with the connector expected to go live starting the week of 8 December […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Yesterday we published the interview I conducted with Cboe CEO Craig Donohue on the exhibition floor at FIA EXPO in mid-November. In the interview, Donohue discussed the importance of the CFTC’s makeup, Cboe’s current market position, growth opportunities, including prediction markets and crypto, and changes […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff CyrusOne’s Aurora, Illinois data center, home to the CME Group‘s core electronic trading platform, is drawing fresh attention after a cooling failure halted futures trading across global markets on Friday while you may not have been paying attention because you were doing your Black Friday […]
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