eToro Opens 65 CME Futures to Australia’s CFD Clients

Australian clients of eToro can now trade 65 futures contracts listed by CME Group, the broker announced on Thursday. The contracts span metals, equity indices, energy, currencies, crops and interest rates, per Finance Magnates, and come in reduced sizes that require less capital for each position.

The new listings sit alongside the contracts for difference eToro already offers in Australia, a market where an ASIC review published in January found the firm accounts for 45% of existing CFD traders, Finance Magnates reported.

Also read: Coinbase, Robinhood Futures Hold $581M, Topping US Retail Forex

Key facts

• eToro AUS Capital Limited issues the contracts under a target market determination dated October 28.
• Margin combines CME’s requirement with an eToro buffer, and every position must carry a stop loss.
• Clients must clear a suitability questionnaire and a knowledge test; those who fail cannot retry for 30 days.
• Accounts receive a margin close-out alert at 20% of available equity, along with negative balance protection.
• eToro’s third-quarter net contribution fell 13% year over year to $186 million.

How the Australian list compares with Spain

eToro has introduced futures country by country. Spain opened with 20 CME contracts across equities, energy and gold, and in July 2025 the broker added spot-quoted futures there with a minimum of roughly $200. On Finance Magnates’ calculation, Australia’s opening slate is more than three times the size of Spain’s first list.

Robert Francis, managing director of eToro Australia, said the company was bringing “smaller-sized futures to our Australian community.” In August, Sharon Brimer, eToro’s senior director of dealing, said the firm had seen little migration away from CFDs in markets where both products are offered.

Also read: ASIC Says No Prediction Market Firm Has Applied for a License

The United States comes later. On its third-quarter call, eToro said futures from TradeZero, the US broker it agreed to buy in August, would move into its main app once the deal closes, which it expects in the first half of 2027.

Regulators keep watching how leverage is sold

The screening steps arrive after years of scrutiny of eToro’s Australian CFD operation. ASIC brought its first design and distribution case against the local unit in 2023, alleging the CFD target market was drawn too broadly. Futures sales are also under the regulator’s eye: an August review of nine online brokers selling futures, short-dated options and fractional shares faulted target market documents that did not explain how products suited clients. eToro was not among the nine.

ASIC has kept its CFD rules in place and has proposed extending its CFD product intervention order by 10 years, to 2037. Web traffic to Australian retail FX and CFD brokers has also declined, with visits down 26.9% from the prior quarter to 4.55 million in the third quarter, according to FM Intelligence’s heat map.

eToro and CME also signed an education agreement covering videos on how futures work and the risks they carry. Julie Winkler, chief commercial officer at CME Group, said that as self-directed investors adopt the products, education is essential to helping them trade effectively.

A parallel move in crypto media

A separate development points in the same direction: embedding traded derivatives inside places where people read about markets. Crypto Briefing reported on November 11 that Decrypt integrated perpetual futures trading powered by Phoenix, a Solana exchange run by Ellipsis Labs. Perpetual futures track an asset’s price without expiring, and Decrypt readers can go long or short on crypto, US stocks, gold and pre-IPO companies around the clock, drawing on a single Decrypt Money Account balance. Decrypt co-founder Farokh confirmed the integration on Decrypt’s X account the same day.

Phoenix runs an on-chain central limit order book, supports USDC and native SOL as collateral, and settles profits and losses in USDC. The exchange had operated in private beta since December 2025, listed 106 perpetual futures markets across 55 cryptocurrencies and 46 stocks or ETFs, and reported about $31.76 million in 24-hour volume and roughly $16.51 million in open interest as of the announcement. Before starting a rewards program in July 2026, it crossed $1 billion in unincentivized trading volume.

Both stories add leverage to an audience rather than building a new venue from scratch. For eToro, that means converting a base it already dominates in Australia toward exchange-cleared products; for Decrypt, it means turning readers into traders on Phoenix’s order books while the publication already runs prediction markets, token swaps and an Earn product under its Information Exchange banner.

Why it matters

The Australian launch enlarges a market where retail CFD participation is already concentrated in eToro’s hands, and it shifts part of that activity toward centrally cleared contracts governed by CME’s margin rules. It also tests whether smaller contract sizes draw clients who found standard futures too capital-heavy, a question eToro’s own dealing desk has said produced limited CFD-to-futures movement so far. For regulators, the rollout is a live case study in how a broker with a contested CFD history sells a leveraged product under fresh ASIC scrutiny.

What to watch

The next milestones are ASIC’s decision on extending its CFD product intervention order to 2037 and the closing of eToro’s TradeZero acquisition, which the company expects in the first half of 2027 and which would bring US futures into its main app. Nothing here constitutes financial advice; leveraged futures and perpetual markets are volatile and can lose more than the capital committed.

Written by

StockPil Editorial

The StockPil Editorial desk covers stock markets, business, finance, forex and crypto. Our AI-assisted newsroom builds each article from published, linked sources, checks it for accuracy before it goes live, and our editors review published articles and correct anything that needs it.

Sources: Finance Magnates, Crypto Briefing