CFTC's Mention-Markets Review: What Counts as 'Readily Susceptible to Manipulation'

Gabriel Perez, a technical assistant who had operated Donald Trump's teleprompter since 2016, profited from Kalshi contracts tied to whether the president would say specific words during public remarks. Kalshi's own surveillance flagged the pattern, froze roughly $90,000 in his profits, and referred the trades to federal authorities.

Investigators reportedly found that during portions of speeches where Trump departed from the prepared script, Perez would exit positions tied to the scripted language before he knew it would not be said. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan declined to bring criminal charges, and Perez has reportedly discussed a settlement with the CFTC involving forfeiture of his earnings, but the episode pushed the Commission toward a broader look at the product category itself.

Following the disclosure, the CFTC opened a review of "mention markets," contracts that settle on whether a public figure utters a specific word or phrase, to examine whether the category is readily susceptible to manipulation under the core principles that govern designated contract markets. The review covers the product category broadly rather than any single contract or exchange.

Kalshi removed mention-style contracts from its sports offerings until further notice while the review proceeds, but kept the category live for politics, corporate earnings calls, and television newscasts. Polymarket offers comparable mention markets only on its unregulated offshore site, not on its CFTC-regulated Polymarket US platform, a distinction that keeps that side of its business outside this particular review.

Every designated contract market must satisfy Core Principle 3 of the Commodity Exchange Act, codified at 17 CFR § 38.200, which requires that a DCM list for trading only contracts that are not readily susceptible to manipulation. Appendix C to Part 38 gives DCMs guidance on the factors relevant to that determination, including whether a cash-settled contract creates an incentive to manipulate the underlying data or event it settles against.

The CFTC's own March 2026 guidance on event contracts specifically flagged the risk that contracts settling on the actions of a single person or a small group of individuals, such as an injury, an ejection, or a specific act during a live event, may raise manipulation concerns distinct from contracts tied to broader, harder-to-influence outcomes. A mention contract fits that description closely: the outcome can turn entirely on one individual's choice of words.

A contract on whether a specific word is spoken differs from a contract on a game's final score because a single insider with advance knowledge of the script, or influence over what will be said, can settle the market with near certainty. Sports contracts generally still depend on athletic performance under conditions no single party fully controls, even when individual actions matter to the outcome.

One person familiar with the review reportedly said mention markets are "not popular across the political aisle" and are potentially very easy to manipulate, prompting the CFTC to take a hard look at whether some of them make sense as a listed product category at all. That framing suggests the review could end in anything from added surveillance requirements to an outright restriction on certain mention-market types, though no formal complaint or rule proposal had been filed as of this writing.

For exchanges listing or considering mention-style contracts, the practical lesson is that Core Principle 3 compliance is not satisfied simply because a contract has traded without incident. An exchange should be able to show, in the kind of supporting documentation Appendix C to Part 38 contemplates, how it assessed and mitigated the manipulation risk created by concentrating settlement power in one or a few individuals.

The review also illustrates that the CFTC's scrutiny of event contracts is not limited to the state preemption fights playing out in federal courts. Product-level manipulation risk is a separate compliance question the Commission can act on regardless of how those preemption cases are eventually decided, and it is one that predates and outlasts any single episode like the teleprompter-operator trades that triggered this particular review.