iStockphoto / Jerry Lai-USA TODAY Sports/Marcio Silva
The Stanley Cup Trophy in front of the Wall Street Bull
Wall Street has spent centuries turning oil, wheat, and basically every imaginable source of anxiety into something people can trade. CME Group is preparing to add NHL team performance to the list, because apparently watching your favorite hockey team blow a third-period lead was not financially stressful enough already.
The NHL products are scheduled to begin trading Sept. 28, pending regulatory review, and will use real-time league statistics to track performance indexes for every team during the 2026-27 season. This is not simply a sportsbook asking whether the Rangers win Tuesday night. It is closer to giving hockey teams their own strange little Wall Street ticker.
Wall Street Is Giving Every NHL Team A Performance Index
CME says the new standard and micro-sized futures will be tied to FutureSports indexes built from official NHL data. Those indexes are designed to rise and fall continuously as a team performs rather than settling on the outcome of one game.
A traditional sports bet might ask whether Boston beats Toronto. These futures are built around rules-based benchmarks measuring team performance over time, with cash-settled contracts based on those indexes.
In other words, your buddy screaming that the Penguins are “trending up” could theoretically be discussing an actual financial instrument instead of desperately defending a seven-game winning streak.
The NHL supplies the official statistics, but FutureSports independently administers the indexes. The league does not determine the values or control the methodology, an important separation when someone eventually loses money and starts blaming a questionable goalie-interference review.
CME also sees customers well beyond fans looking for a new way to care too much about Tuesday night hockey.
Sponsors, broadcasters, arena operators, retailers and food-and-beverage vendors could potentially use the contracts to hedge financial exposure tied to team performance. If a franchise suddenly becomes terrible and fewer people show up to buy $18 beers, businesses connected to that team have real revenue risk.
Apparently somebody looked at that problem and decided it needed derivatives.
This Is Bigger Than Another Sports Prediction Market
Sports-based trading has already exploded through prediction markets. CME itself operates event contracts and has partnered with FanDuel on products that let people trade on whether specific outcomes occur.
These hockey futures are different.
They are designed more like traditional index futures, the same general financial structure Wall Street uses to manage exposure to stock indexes, commodities and other benchmarks. CME and FutureSports announced their broader partnership in July, describing professional sports as a roughly $650 billion global industry ready for traditional risk-management tools.
The NHL is the first major league getting the treatment.
There are still plenty of questions. Regulatory approval remains pending, actual trading volume will determine whether these contracts gain traction, and explaining an NHL performance future at a sports bar may require a whiteboard and several intermissions.
But the concept is fascinating.
Fans have spent years joking about treating athletes and teams like stocks. Buy low. Sell high. Get in before the breakout. Wall Street apparently heard the joke and started building the exchange.
Your favorite NHL team already has a standings page. Soon, it could have a futures market too.