CFTC Grants Exemption and Approves Rule Changes for Gold and Silver ETF Contracts
Co-authored by Joshua A. Penner
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has issued an exemption, pursuant to Section 4(c) of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), which would permit options and futures on ETFs Physical Swiss Gold Shares and ETFs Physical Swiss Silver Shares to be traded and cleared, in the case of options contracts, as options on securities, and in the case of futures contracts, as security futures contracts. The exemption is consistent with prior CFTC action on similar exchange-traded fund products, which have gold and silver, both regulated commodities, as their primary underlying assets, and thus implicate potentially overlapping areas of authority between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In conjunction with the exemption, the CFTC also approved a requested change to the rules of the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) to permit the OCC to clear these products.
The CFTC press release regarding the exemption and rule change is available here.
