Updated May 2026: I’ve refreshed this article after the launch of FMX SOFR futures, the later launch of U.S. Treasury futures, BGC’s latest reported FMX volume and market-share figures, and Howard Lutnick’s move from BGC to the U.S. Commerce Department.
FMX Futures Is Now Live
FMX is no longer a proposed challenger to CME. It is now a live exchange, and the early numbers are giving traders something to consider.
When I first wrote about FMX, the story was pre-launch. BGC wanted to use its strength in cash Treasuries, its LCH clearing link and a heavyweight group of bank and market-maker backers to force competition into U.S. rates futures.
Since then, the exchange has gone live. FMX launched SOFR futures in September 2024 and added U.S. Treasury futures in May 2025, starting with the 2-year and 5-year contracts. BGC has been reporting growth in FMX UST market share, SOFR futures volume, open interest and early Treasury futures activity.
CME has not been knocked off its perch yet. Futures exchange dominance is hard to dislodge because liquidity attracts liquidity. Traders go where the spread is tight, the book is deep, the clearing works and the rest of the market is already trading. FMX still has to make traders care enough to move.
Background: Lutnick’s Long Fight With CME
Howard Lutnick helped bring electronic government bond trading into the market in the late 1990s and had been trying to challenge CME in U.S. Treasury futures for years before FMX launched.
This is his third run at the problem. The first attempt came in the late 1990s with the New York Board of Trade. The second came in 2007 with Citadel through ELX Futures, which struggled partly after losing its clearing partner.
The difference this time is BGC’s cash Treasury base. Fenics UST, now part of FMX UST, had already built meaningful share in electronic cash Treasury trading before the futures exchange went live. BGC reported FMX UST CLOB market share of 28% in the first quarter of 2024, up from 18% a year earlier. That gave FMX a stronger starting point than a futures-only challenger would usually have.
The shareholder list also gave the launch more weight. Bank of America, Barclays, Citadel Securities, Citi, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Jump Trading Group, Morgan Stanley, Tower Research Capital and Wells Fargo became minority equity owners of FMX in 2024 at a $667mn post-money valuation.
The corporate backdrop has changed since launch. Lutnick stepped down as BGC chairman and chief executive in February 2025 after being confirmed as U.S. Commerce Secretary. BGC named Stephen Merkel chairman, and Brandon Lutnick joined the BGC board. Reuters later reported that Howard Lutnick transferred his Cantor Fitzgerald ownership stake to his children and other investors under his government ethics arrangements, with Brandon Lutnick managing the family trusts and serving as Cantor’s chairman and chief executive.
What FMX Actually Connects
FMX is best understood as BGC trying to join up several markets that rates desks already trade side by side.
FMX UST covers cash U.S. Treasuries. FMX Futures covers listed U.S. interest-rate futures, starting with SOFR and Treasury contracts. FMX FX covers spot foreign exchange. Around that sits BGC’s wider Fenics business, including repo and NDF activity.
The reason this is more interesting than a bare futures launch is the overlap between those markets. Treasury basis traders care about the relationship between cash bonds and futures. Swap desks care about margin, clearing and hedging. Macro desks often move between Treasuries, futures, swaps and FX in the same session.
That is the commercial pitch behind FMX. BGC is not trying to win rates futures with a futures screen alone. It is trying to use an existing cash Treasury footprint, LCH clearing and electronic market plumbing to make the futures venue harder to ignore.
Specs, Access and Costs Versus CME/CBOT
For a trader, the FMX story quickly becomes practical. Can I route orders there? Is the book deep enough? Are the fee savings actually passed through by my broker, FCM or platform?
On the exchange-fee layer, FMX currently has the cleaner pitch. FMX says it is not collecting exchange trading fees from participants until further notice. Its market-data page also says exchange data fees are waived until further notice for trading connectivity clients, although vendors may still charge their own connectivity or distribution fees.
That makes the exchange and exchange-data layer cheaper than CME/CBOT at present, assuming your broker passes the benefit through and everything else is comparable. The catch is that the all-in cost for a trader still depends on the broker commission, clearing fees, routing setup, platform fees, data vendor fees and the actual quality of the FMX order book.
| Product | FMX version | CME/CBOT comparison | Trader point |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2-year Treasury futures | FMX F02. $200,000 face value. 1/8 of 1/32 tick, worth $7.8125. Physically settled and cleared at LCH. | CBOT 2-Year T-Note futures are the established incumbent contract and also use a $7.8125 minimum tick in the standard setup. $200,000 face value. | The tick value is similar. FMX’s advantage is mainly fee/data waiver, LCH clearing and any liquidity that builds around the alternative venue. |
| 5-year Treasury futures | FMX F05. $100,000 face value. 1/8 of 1/32 tick, worth $3.90625. Physically settled and cleared at LCH. | CBOT 5-Year T-Note futures use a $100,000 face value. CME’s own Treasury futures material describes the 5-year futures minimum tick as 1/4 of 1/32, worth $7.8125. | FMX has the finer outright tick in the 5-year. That could help short-term execution and queueing, but only if enough liquidity appears at the inside market. |
| Three-month SOFR futures | FMX FS3. $2,500 × contract index. 1/8 bp tick near expiry, worth $3.125, and 1/4 bp elsewhere, worth $6.25. Cash settled and cleared at LCH. | CME SR3 is the dominant SOFR futures market and uses the same broad $2,500 index structure. | FMX may be cheaper on exchange and exchange-data fees, but CME still has the incumbent liquidity advantage in SOFR. |
The 5-year tick is worth flagging. FMX lists its 5-year Treasury future with a $3.90625 outright tick. CME’s standard 5-year Treasury future is the established benchmark, but the usual tick value is larger. For an active short-term trader, a finer tick can be attractive because it gives more price points to work with. It can also become meaningless if the book is too thin or the queue is not worth joining.
SOFR is a slightly different comparison. FMX’s Three-Month SOFR contract is cash settled, cleared at LCH, and uses a $2,500 multiplier. FMX says contracts with four months or less to last trading day trade in 1/8 bp ticks worth $3.125, while other contracts trade in 1/4 bp ticks worth $6.25. CME’s Three-Month SOFR contract also uses a $2,500 multiplier and is already the dominant liquidity pool, with CME saying its SOFR futures and options trade on average more than 5mn contracts per day.
Access is the harder part to judge from the outside. Trading Technologies has a public FMX help page saying TT supports FMX market connectivity for SOFR futures. TT also published release notes saying a separate FMX_USTF market was made available on TT for FMX U.S. Treasury futures.
On the FCM side, FMX lists StoneX Financial Inc. as an FMX clearing participant. StoneX’s own futures clearing page also lists FMX among its direct clearing-member exchanges, and names CQG and Trading Technologies among its independent service providers.
I would still be careful before assuming ordinary retail access. StoneX may be a more realistic route for professional, prop or active futures accounts than a generic retail setup. FMX’s own June 2024 overview said it had engaged execution vendors including Trading Technologies, Broadway, CQG, Fidessa/ION XTPE and QB, but I have not found a current public CQG help page confirming live FMX routing. I also could not verify FMX on Quantower’s public connections page. If you use AMP, CQG, Quantower or another retail-style platform route, check the specific exchange entitlement with the broker before assuming it is available.
Ask whether your account can route FMX orders, whether FMX market data is enabled, whether the exchange fee and data fee waivers are passed through, and whether the contract you want actually has enough depth for the way you trade.
The LCH Clearing Angle
The strongest institutional argument for FMX is not the exchange screen by itself. It is the clearing setup.
FMX clears its listed rates contracts through LCH. FMX says all FMX Futures positions are eligible for cross-margining against a member’s SwapClear portfolio across more than a dozen major currencies. LSEG’s Listed Rates page says LCH clears FMX 3-month SOFR futures and 2-year and 5-year U.S. Treasury Note futures, with portfolio margining against cleared interest rate swap positions at SwapClear.
That is aimed at a different audience from a small outright futures scalper. If a firm already clears large interest-rate swap positions at LCH, being able to margin FMX futures against that SwapClear portfolio can reduce the capital tied up in related positions. For relative-value desks, basis traders and swap-heavy accounts, that is a real commercial reason to look at FMX rather than treating it as just another futures venue.
LSEG describes the Listed Rates service as a way to generate margin and operational efficiencies between OTC and listed derivatives positions, using portfolio margining against cleared interest-rate swaps. The potential benefit is lower margin and reduced counterparty risk inside one clearing ecosystem.
There is already evidence of this moving beyond theory. In 2025, FOW reported that Marex enabled the first margin savings for a client trading U.S. interest-rate futures on FMX while clearing interest-rate swaps through LCH.
| Trader type | What FMX might offer | What still matters |
|---|---|---|
| Short-term outright futures trader | Fee/data waiver, finer 5-year tick and another venue to watch. | Platform access, broker pass-through, spread, book depth and execution quality. |
| Prop or market-making account | Lower exchange/data costs, possible queueing advantage in the 5-year, and access through professional FCM/platform routes. | Whether enough other participants are quoting and trading the same products. |
| Basis or relative-value desk | Cash Treasury footprint, listed futures, and possible portfolio margining around related rates positions. | How well FMX liquidity lines up with cash, swaps and CME/CBOT hedges. |
| Swap-heavy institutional account | Potential LCH portfolio margining between FMX futures and cleared IRS positions at SwapClear. | Eligibility, clearing-member setup, risk offsets and operational integration. |
For a smaller trader, the LCH point may be mostly indirect. You may not have an offsetting swaps book to margin against. But if the margin economics help bring market makers, basis desks and institutional flow to FMX, that can still matter because better participation usually means a more useful order book.
FMX Growth So Far
BGC reported that FMX UST generated record quarterly average daily volume of $89.7bn in the first quarter of 2026, up 51 per cent from a year earlier. Its first-quarter market share rose to 41 per cent, compared with 39 per cent in the previous quarter and 33 per cent a year earlier.
The futures side is still much younger, but the growth rate is now measurable. BGC said SOFR futures average daily volume climbed to more than 39,000 contracts in the first quarter of 2026, compared with 2,200 contracts a year earlier. Quarter-end open interest reached about 143,000 contracts, up from 8,000 in the prior-year period.
Treasury futures are earlier again. BGC said U.S. Treasury futures volume built through April 2026 and reached a high of about 30,000 contracts on April 29.
Those figures need some perspective. CME remains the entrenched rates futures venue, and Treasury futures liquidity is not easily moved. But FMX is no longer only asking the market to believe in a launch deck. It now has cash Treasury share, SOFR open interest and early Treasury futures prints to point to.
| Metric | Earlier point | Latest reported point |
|---|---|---|
| FMX UST CLOB market share | 28% in Q1 2024 | 41% in Q1 2026 |
| FMX UST quarterly ADV | — | $89.7bn in Q1 2026 |
| SOFR futures ADV | 2,200 contracts in Q1 2025 | More than 39,000 in Q1 2026 |
| SOFR futures open interest | 8,000 contracts in Q1 2025 | About 143,000 at Q1 2026 quarter-end |
| U.S. Treasury futures volume | launched May 2025 | About 30,000 contracts on April 29, 2026 |
If you want to check on the daily FMX volumes in 2026 you can find them here.
