Moomoo to Route NYSE Binary Options to US Retail From Launch

Moomoo will offer the New York Stock Exchange's all-or-nothing stock options to US retail clients from launch, the broker said Wednesday. Each contract pays a fixed $100 or nothing, depending on where the underlying stock or exchange-traded fund (ETF) settles at expiry.

The announcement attaches a retail distributor to the product NYSE outlined in October. Moomoo says it counts more than 31 million users worldwide, including affiliates. The firm is the US arm of Hong Kong-listed Futu Holdings.

Moomoo already sells yes-or-no trades through another channel. It added Kalshi's event contracts in June, which sit under Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) jurisdiction. The NYSE options, by contrast, are securities overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — a jurisdictional split that shapes which venue can list what.

How big is the demand?

The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation puts monthly event contract volume at roughly $1 billion in 2024, rising to more than $50 billion by July 2026. That growth curve explains why three binary products from two US exchanges now have named retail brokers — and none of them shares a distributor.

• Cboe listed yes-or-no options on the Mini-S&P 500 index in June, with Interactive Brokers as first distributor.
• Charles Schwab said it would follow on the Cboe index product.
• Robinhood is lined up for Cboe's second product: $1-or-nothing contracts on company figures such as iPhone sales, which the SEC cleared in October.
• By FinanceMagnates.com's count, Moomoo makes four named brokers across the three products.

What does the product look like?

The first lineup covers six stocks — including Apple, Nvidia and Tesla — and six ETFs tracking gold, silver, bitcoin, Treasuries and US equities. Five weekly expiries will be listed at once. The contracts are European-style: they can be exercised only at expiry, so there is no early-assignment risk for sellers.

Moomoo pitched the product to clients trading around earnings and economic releases. Buyers who are wrong lose the premium they paid — the defined-risk profile is the core selling point.

The next chapter of options trading "should make it easier for investors to translate a market view into a trade," said Neil McDonald, chief executive of Moomoo US.

Moomoo said it would support the trades with probability models and risk tools. The release's fine print qualifies that claim: the featured tools are available only to members of Moomoo Engine, a subscription priced at $3.99 a month. Desks comparing retail distributors should treat the analytics bundle as paid, not bundled.

What is the timeline?

Moomoo gave no start date. NYSE told Reuters on October 27 that it planned to begin trading within days, and Moomoo said it also plans to offer the contracts in Asia — an international rollout that would extend the product beyond the SEC's perimeter.

The listing is not NYSE's first attempt at the format. Its owner, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), relaunched the same Finish High and Finish Low contracts on NYSE Amex Options in April 2016, with online broker TradeKing named in that launch announcement. The 2016 version did not establish a durable retail franchise; whether a distributor base of four brokers and a vastly larger event-contract market changes that outcome is the open question as trading begins.