First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff I encourage you to join me and Shanghai Walt (David Setters’s nickname for Walt Lukken) to support David Setters and the Darby Rimmer MND Foundation’s March of the Day 3, as he and the team walk from Anfield in Liverpool to The Rob Burrow MND […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Burdensome-Mix has been unmasked. It turns out “Burdensome-Mix” was not, as his Polymarket handle suggested, a grumpy barista’s signature latte; he was an active-duty U.S. Army service member allegedly turning classified intelligence about the capture of Nicolás Maduro into a $404,000 score on the “Maduro […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff On Tuesday, Hillary Till, principal at Premia Research LLC and managing co-editor of Commodity Insights Digest, presented “Why Some Commodity Futures Markets Thrive and Others Die” at the NCCC-134 conference in Chicago. NCCC-134 is a multi-state research coordinating committee, organized under the USDA’s National Institute […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Cboe Global Markets has agreed to sell its Canadian and Australian equities exchanges, Cboe Canada and Cboe Australia, to TMX Group for a total of $300 million as part of a broader strategic realignment announced in 2025. The deal is intended to shift Cboe’s focus […]
Read articleFormer CME Group executive is betting on separated roles, daily net settlement and stablecoin collateral as traditional finance converges with digital assets. BOCA RATON, FL (JLN) - April 21, 2026 — The shift of crypto trading into the institutional mainstream is still “in the early innings,” but large banks and broker-dealers are no longer asking whether to enter the market and instead are focused on how, according to Tony Acuña, chief executive officer of EDX Markets. “We’ve gone now from people saying, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure, I’m thinking about it’ to ‘how do we get into crypto?’” Acuña told John Lothian News in an interview at FIA’s Global Cleared Markets conference in Boca Raton. “These folks are now planning to get in. Some are very close. And I think that we’re going to see a few large folks go live this year,” he said, describing a pipeline of traditional institutions preparing to trade on platforms built to resemble familiar market structure.
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff It is with deep sadness that the futures/derivatives/digital asset community marks the passing of Gabriella M. “Gabby” Kusz of Chicago, a respected leader whose work bridged traditional finance and digital innovation. Over more than two decades in global finance, Gabby held roles at the World […]
Read articleUS private credit firm First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Messaging matters, and Gary Gensler and Simon Johnson’s podcast has been noticed by the SEC, as Chairman Paul Atkins launches “Material Matters With SEC Chairman Paul Atkins.” While the “Power and Consequences” podcast takes a look at big macro issues, Atkins’s […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff US regulators are probing a series of suspiciously well‑timed oil futures trades placed just before President Donald Trump’s recent shifts in policy on the war in Iran, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is examining spikes in trading […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Gary Gensler earns an out-of-office leadership award today for speaking out about a timely subject, the one everyone is talking about. In an exclusive Barron’s interview by Nick Devor, former CFTC and SEC Chair Gensler said today’s booming sports-focused prediction markets have gone far beyond […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff There is a new word to know: Bugmageddon. Anthropic’s powerful new AI model Mythos is finding software vulnerabilities at an unprecedented scale — including a 27-year-old bug in the OpenBSD operating system — and cybersecurity professionals, White House officials, and banking executives are scrambling to […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Every week, the CFTC sends me its weekly swaps report. I wondered why it does not mention event contract swaps. I twice sent an email to the CFTC and received no reply. It made me wonder, what is the definition of a swap? So I […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Yesterday, I was the guest speaker for a virtual NFA staff conversation and was interviewed by NFA Head of External Affairs & Communications Christie Hillsman von Ohlen. The discussion covered my entrance to the industry, the various roles I have held, MarketsWiki Education World of […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff U.S. futures commission merchants (FCMs) face record capital requirements, reaching $49.1 billion in January 2026, according to Joshua Walker of Risk.net. Requirements rose 4.1% month over month and 20.7% year over year, marking the fastest growth since 2021 and the largest increase since at least […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff That was too close. “The Day Trump’s Iran Threat Gripped the World,” by Wall Street Journal staff, opens with a president wielding Armageddon as a bargaining chip, turning an ordinary Tuesday morning into a 12‑hour countdown to possible civilizational annihilation. At 8:06 a.m., Donald Trump […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff The “AI is taking our jobs” news today is not so happy. The Wall Street Journal reports that workers displaced by artificial intelligence could face lasting economic setbacks, according to a new Goldman Sachs study summarized by Te-Ping Chen. Analyzing four decades of federal data […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff I spent some time this holiday weekend working on a scorecard for “Prediction Markets vs. States — Open Cases and Timeline.” I am not the only one who has been busy tracking this data. Alexander Kim, an associate at Katten, has built a personal interactive […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff The Trump administration has sued Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois to block their efforts to regulate prediction markets, arguing that attempts to treat “event contracts” as gambling intrude on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s exclusive authority over national swaps markets, Jonathan Stempel of Reuters reported. The […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Today we published two videos: one from Boca and one from my post-Boca sojourn to Sarasota, FL. From Boca, we have an interview with Jeanine Hightower-Sellitto, senior vice president, GM of DraftKings Predictions. I have known Jeanine since her days at ISE, so it was […]
Read articleFirst Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Yesterday, Gary Compton retired from Cboe Global Markets, where he had worked for about the last 27 years. Compton was a vice president of corporate communications and someone with whom we at JLN regularly communicated about Cboe-related issues and projects. For years, he worked with […]
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