ForecastEx

What it is

ForecastEx is a CFTC-designated contract market and a registered derivatives clearing organization — it lists the contracts and clears them itself. The CFTC issued both orders together, announced on 25 June 2024, with the designated-contract-market date recorded as 24 June 2024. Operations started on 1 August 2024, per Interactive Brokers' own press release; an earlier release had announced 8 July 2024, and that date slipped. US election contracts followed on 3 October 2024.

The vendor on this card is ForecastEx and not Interactive Brokers, because ForecastEx is who holds the CFTC registrations, publishes the rulebook and fee schedule, and signs the contract you enter into. Interactive Brokers Group owns it outright — the parent is a fact about the company, not about the product, and most readers will reach the product through IBKR's own ForecastTrader platform.

The mechanism is genuinely unusual and the reason this card exists. A Forecast Contract pays $1.00 to the winning side and $0.00 to the losing side. You do not buy from a seller. You submit a bid, between $0.01 and $0.99, for either the Yes position or the No position, prioritised by price-time priority; when the combined Yes and No bids reach $1.00, the exchange pairs them and — in the rulebook's own words — the Yes bidder executes a contract with ForecastEx and the No bidder executes a contract with ForecastEx. Everything is fully collateralised: each side posts cash equal to what it bid. So the counterparty is the exchange, funded by the person whose opposite bid completed yours.

One consequence follows and it is the product's real differentiator: because the collateral sits in cash at the clearing house, it earns interest, and the rulebook requires that interest to come back. See Pricing.

Conditional contracts add a third outcome — where the condition does not occur, the contract resolves "False" and each side gets its consideration back, less transaction fees.

Availability

You cannot have an account with ForecastEx. Rule 301 states that membership is not offered for the personal accounts of natural persons, and Rule 304 routes everyone else through a futures commission merchant. This is the first practical fact about availability and it is the one most descriptions miss.

Three FCM members are listed on ForecastEx's own members page on 19 September 2026 — Interactive Brokers, Robinhood and Advantage Futures. The common description of ForecastEx as an Interactive Brokers-only venue is out of date; Robinhood routes some of its event-contract flow here.

Non-US access exists, and it is narrower than the FCM list suggests. Interactive Brokers' ForecastTrader disclosures state that event contracts are available only to eligible clients aged 21 or older of Interactive Brokers LLC, Interactive Brokers Canada Inc., Interactive Brokers Hong Kong Limited, Interactive Brokers Ireland Limited and Interactive Brokers Singapore Pte. Ltd., and that availability varies by IBKR affiliate and country of residence. Canada opened on 1 April 2025 and the European expansion followed on 30 July 2025.

One contract type carves out by residency rather than by country. IBKR's own disclosure is explicit — ForecastEx contracts on US election results are available only to eligible US residents. That is a per-contract restriction inside an otherwise served jurisdiction, which is a different shape of block from a geoblock or a declined signup.

So the restriction here is not an IP filter and not a checkbox. It is an eligibility test run by your broker at account level, under that broker's own onboarding, in whichever jurisdiction that broker's entity is licensed. KYC is therefore whatever the FCM requires, and for a futures account that is identity, address and suitability. Note the age floor differs by route — 21 through Interactive Brokers, 18 through Robinhood.

Pricing

Transaction fee — $0.01 per contract, per side, charged at execution, from ForecastEx's own fee schedule. It is charged to both the Yes and the No side of each executed transaction, and it is independent of resolution, netting and settlement. On a contract that pays out at $1.00, a cent is a full 1% of the maximum payout, which is why this card's fee fields read 1. Unlike Kalshi and Polymarket, where the charge is a coefficient applied to price, here the cent is absolute — so 1% is the rate at every price, not just at the midpoint.

How that changed, and why an older description is wrong. Until 31 March 2026 the exchange paired bids at a combined $1.01 and kept the extra cent as embedded fee income, collected at resolution. A CFTC self-certification dated 2 March 2026 moved the pairing threshold to $1.00 effective 31 March 2026 at 16:15 CT and made the cent an explicit transaction fee charged at execution instead. Anything describing the embedded-fee mechanism is stale.

The Incentive Coupon is the part that has no equivalent elsewhere in this category. Rule 612(c) requires the clearing house to pass all interest it earns on monies in collateral accounts, less fees, to members as a monthly coupon payment, and permits an FCM member to pass some or all of it to their customers. Interactive Brokers' ForecastTrader page quoted a rate of 3.38% APY, accruing daily and paid monthly, on 19 September 2026, and states that rates are subject to change. Treat that as a dated observation and not a property of the product: the rule is durable, the number is not, and whether you see any of it depends on your FCM.

There are also a Member Volume Incentive Program and a Market Maker Program, which are rebate schemes for members rather than retail pricing.

Markets & resolution

No sports — as policy, not as a rule. Rule 401(b) names economic, business, environmental, legislative or social events and then "any other event that the Exchange chooses", excluding only what the CFTC prohibits, so the rulebook does not forbid sports; the practice does. The live listing bears that out — US initial jobless claims, the unemployment rate, retail sales, building permits, payroll employment, CPI, the Fed funds target rate, housing starts, real GDP, corporate profits, the national debt, global temperature, plus US elections and financial-market questions. This is the sharpest contrast in the category with the venues where sports is the majority of the volume.

Resolution is per-contract and published in advance. Each contract has its own terms-and-conditions document naming a source agency and a resolution time. The building-permits contract, for instance, names the US Census Bureau and resolves at 07:00 CT on publication — and states explicitly that only the initial release counts, and later revisions do not affect the outcome. That sentence is worth reading twice, because revisions to US macroeconomic series are routine and can be large; a position that was right about the revised figure and wrong about the first print loses.

That arrangement removes almost all of the ambiguity that dogs resolution elsewhere. There is no oracle, no token-holder vote and no discretionary read of a news story — but equally there is no dispute window, and the initial-release rule means the contract can settle against a number that the source agency itself later says was wrong.

The rulebook we read carries a version date of 17 September 2026.

Integrations

ForecastEx publishes no public API, no WebSocket feed and no SDK, and there is no ForecastEx app or ForecastEx account. Access is whatever the FCM provides.

Through Interactive Brokers that is ForecastTrader, a web platform for forecast contracts and event contracts on selected CME futures, with positions also visible inside IBKR's main platforms under consolidated reporting; IBKR's ScaleTrader algorithm works on ForecastEx contracts, and since 14 May 2026 IBKR has offered a unified prediction-markets interface across Kalshi, CME Group and ForecastEx with routing to the best net price. Through Robinhood it is the Robinhood mobile app.

Limitations

• You cannot open an account directly. The rulebook bars individuals from membership, so the venue is only as available as your broker is, and the broker sets the KYC, the age floor and the platform.
• No API, no automation of its own, no data export. Anything programmatic runs through the FCM's interface.
• Only the initial release counts. A contract on a revised statistic settles against the first print, which is a real and under-advertised risk on macroeconomic series.
• No dispute mechanism. Resolution is mechanical against a named source, which is clean until the source itself is late, restated or ambiguous.
• The widely repeated claim that cumulative notional volume passed $1 billion by January 2026 has no primary source we could find — not in any Interactive Brokers press release, not in a ForecastEx announcement and not in an SEC filing. It is not on this card. The only volume milestone IBKR published for this product is more than 1,000,000 election forecast contracts traded, in late 2024.
• The Incentive Coupon rate moves and may not reach you. 3.38% APY was the quoted rate on 19 September 2026; the rulebook obliges the clearing house to pass interest to members, and only permits the FCM to pass it on to you.
• Nobody here has funded an account. Everything above is read from the ForecastEx rulebook, fee schedule, contract terms and members page, from CFTC orders and filings, and from Interactive Brokers' own disclosures, on 19 September 2026.

Alternatives

Kalshi is the obvious comparison for the same macro contracts, with an API, a direct account and no interest on collateral. Polymarket lists far more and resolves quite differently. Robinhood Prediction Markets is one of the three routes into this exchange, and it is the one with a mobile app.