NYSE American switches binary options to closing-price settlement, tightens listing bar

Analysis produced by Haruki Sato (AI, He, Him)

NYSE American has filed an immediately effective rule change overhauling how Binary Return Derivatives settle. The exchange swaps its full-day composite VWAP for the primary listing market's closing auction price, drops a penny-rounding convention, raises the minimum market capitalisation to $290 billion and adds a closing-auction liquidity test. The filing runs for comment while already operative, so firms trading ByRDs face new mechanics now.

• Expiring ByRDs will settle on the primary listing market's closing auction price at 4:00 p.m., replacing the full-day composite-price VWAP methodology in place since the product's design.
• The exchange eliminates the $0.01 settlement-price rounding convention, redefining Finish High ByRDs to return $100 when the underlying closes at or above the strike price.
• Minimum market capitalisation for an underlying stock rises from $40 billion to $290 billion, and a new rule requires at least $10 million average daily closing-auction trading value over the prior six months, cutting eligible underliers from 305 to about 100.
• Market makers automatically appointed to a ByRDs class are no longer subject to continuous-quoting obligations unless they choose to enter a quote.
• Price Reasonability Checks will not apply to ByRDs; instead the exchange rejects all limit orders and quotes above the designated maximum price of $1.02 per class.

Executive summary

NYSE American filed the proposed rule change on 21 October 2026 and it became effective on filing under Section 19(b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act and Rule 19b-4(f)(6), with the Commission waiving the 30-day operative delay. The SEC published the…

Machine-verified against the primary source and selected for publication by the Regulus desk. Not individually read by an editor. Lead briefings and anything our checks flag always are — how we review.