Prediction markets, digital assets and tokenization have commanded no shortage of attention this year – and with good reason. They remain among the most dynamic frontiers in financial markets, bringing new products, participants and market structures into the fold.
But market integrity is never a challenge reserved for the newest markets. Across equities, options, futures, FX, fixed income and other long-established asset classes, changes in how and when trading occurs are continually reshaping the surveillance landscape.
For compliance professionals, the objective may be consistent across these markets, but the behaviors, data and context needed to identify potentially problematic activity can differ substantially. Here is a snapshot of some of the key market integrity issues shaping seven asset classes today – and what they mean for surveillance.
Equities
Market Integrity Issue: Fragmented Trading Across Venues
U.S. equity trading has long been fragmented across exchanges, alternative trading systems and other off-exchange venues. In 2025, more than half (50.6%) of U.S. NMS stock share volume was reported off-exchange, according to FINRA.
Now, that fragmentation is beginning to extend around the clock as well. Major exchange groups are pushing to expand equities trading to 23 hours a day, five days a week, while FINRA has already extended the operating hours of its Trade Reporting Facilities. More trading hours could mean activity spread across an even wider range of liquidity and market conditions.
Surveillance Imperative: Build the Cross-Market Picture
More than ever, surveillance needs to connect orders, cancellations and executions across venues rather than evaluating behavior from a single vantage point. Longer hours add another layer: the same trading pattern may carry different significance during a thinner overnight session than during the heart of the trading day.
That creates a need for both cross-market visibility and the ability to configure surveillance around different sessions and liquidity environments, while still identifying patterns that span those boundaries.
Options
Market Integrity Issue: 0DTE and the Compression of the Trading Lifecycle
The rise of zero-days-to-expiration (0DTE) options has dramatically compressed the options lifecycle. SEC data shows 0DTE activity increasing from roughly 20% of options volume in 2022 to 28% in 2025.
Positions can now be established, repriced, hedged and expire within the same trading session. And the relevant activity may extend beyond a single contract: nearby strikes and expirations, complex orders and the underlying security can all form part of the same strategy.
Surveillance Imperative: Add Speed Without Losing Context
Options surveillance needs to keep pace with that compressed lifecycle while retaining the relationships that make activity intelligible. That means understanding contract terms and expiry, connecting related series and incorporating relevant activity in the underlying market.
Intraday expiration is particularly important. Surveillance systems and workflows cannot necessarily treat expiry as an overnight event when the entire contract lifecycle may unfold before the closing bell.
A 2025 SEC spoofing case involving activity across neighboring option series offered a useful reminder that monitoring individual contracts in isolation can miss the broader pattern.
Futures
Market Integrity Issue: The Push Toward 24/7 Trading
Futures already trade for much of the day, but true 24/7 markets would represent another step entirely. The CFTC has been actively examining continuous trading, clearing and settlement, including through a 2026 staff advisory and requests for comment on potentially extending standard futures toward 24/7 trading.
The transition is still developing, and the implications may differ considerably by product. A continuously traded crypto derivative, for example, may present different considerations than an agricultural or energy contract tied closely to physical-market activity.
Surveillance Imperative: Prepare for Truly Continuous Oversight
For surveillance teams, the distinctive challenge is operational continuity. Data ingestion, completeness checks and surveillance windows need to operate across conventional trade dates, weekends and holidays. Alert parameters may need to account for periods when liquidity is thinner or an underlying physical or reference market is less active.
The shift also challenges operational assumptions outside the software itself. If markets cease to have meaningful stopping points, investigative and escalation processes cannot assume that activity late on Friday can wait until Monday. Firms need defined out-of-hours coverage for urgent market-conduct and surveillance-coverage issues, named owners and documented handoffs.
FX
Market Integrity Issue: The Line Between Pre-Hedging and Abusive Conduct
In foreign exchange markets, pre-hedging makes the purpose and context of dealer activity particularly important.
A dealer expecting to execute a large client transaction may legitimately trade beforehand to manage the risk it anticipates taking on and potentially facilitate a better execution. But that dealer also possesses information about an expected client trade that the broader market does not. Depending on the purpose, scale and circumstances, the same basic sequence of activity could instead represent problematic use of client information.
IOSCO’s final recommendations on pre-hedging, published in November 2025, emphasize factors including client benefit, proportionality, information controls and surveillance.
Surveillance Imperative: Put Dealer Activity in Context
Simply detecting that a dealer traded before a client execution is not enough. Surveillance may need to connect RFQs or client inquiries with quote timestamps, anticipated order size, dealer positions, subsequent hedging activity and prevailing market conditions.
The question is therefore not merely what happened. Surveillance professionals must be able to determine why, how much and in what context. That makes FX surveillance as much about reconstructing the client-dealer interaction as identifying a trading pattern.
Fixed Income
Market Integrity Issue: Greater Transparency in Traditionally Opaque Markets
Fixed-income markets continue to become more transparent, but not in the same way – or at the same pace – as exchange-traded markets.
FINRA has steadily expanded TRACE reporting and dissemination, including transaction-level information for certain actively traded U.S. Treasury securities. At the same time, the evolution remains calibrated: FINRA ultimately retained a 15-minute outer limit for many TRACE reports after considering a move toward one minute.
The result is a market with more transaction-level information than ever before, but with significant differences in liquidity, reporting timing and market structure from instrument to instrument.
Surveillance Imperative: Turn Better Data Into Better Oversight
Greater transparency gives surveillance teams more opportunity to benchmark activity and reconstruct trading patterns. But fixed-income surveillance cannot simply import an equity-market model.
Some securities trade only episodically, and relevant comparisons may involve other securities from the same issuer, neighboring maturities or points along a yield curve rather than a continuously observable order book. The opportunity is to make richer use of expanding data while preserving the market-specific context needed to interpret it correctly.
Digital Assets
Market Integrity Issue: Growing Interdependence Between Spot and Derivatives Markets
The relationship between digital-asset spot and derivatives markets is becoming increasingly important, particularly as perpetual futures become more established within regulated markets.
Unlike conventional futures, perpetuals do not have a fixed expiration. Instead, funding mechanisms are designed to keep the derivative aligned with its underlying spot asset. In May 2026, the CFTC issued a policy statement addressing perpetual contracts as regulated U.S. markets began listing these products.
That linkage creates a clear integrity question: if a derivative depends on prices generated elsewhere, manipulation of the reference market can potentially affect the value of the derivative.
Surveillance Imperative: Monitor Across Products and Markets
Digital asset surveillance may need to follow the full price-formation chain – from trading in the derivative to relevant spot venues, reference prices and, indices or oracles and funding or liquidation events.
The CFTC’s Mango Markets case demonstrated the risk particularly clearly. The Commission alleged that a trader built leveraged derivative positions before trading heavily on spot exchanges whose prices fed the relevant oracle, dramatically increasing the value of those derivatives.
The key is not simply recognizing that two markets are correlated, but understanding when activity in one market directly feeds the economics of another.
Prediction Markets
Market Integrity Issue: Trading on Material Nonpublic Information
Prediction markets put participant information at the center of the market integrity discussion in an unusually direct way.
As event-contract markets have expanded, regulators have focused on the possibility that people connected to the underlying event may trade with information unavailable to other participants – or, in some cases, may even possess some influence over the outcome itself. The CFTC highlighted the issue in a February 2026 enforcement advisory and later charged a Google employee with allegedly using confidential workplace information to profit from event contracts tied to Google’s “Year in Search” rankings.
Surveillance Imperative: Understand Who Is Trading and What They May Know
Here, unusual price or volume activity may tell only part of the story. Surveillance may also needs to consider participant identity, affiliations, historical behavior and the trader’s relationship to the underlying event.
The contract lifecycle creates another wrinkle. Many event contracts are short-term and may expire intraday, while binary prices naturally move toward 0 or 1 as new information arrives and the outcome becomes clearer. A rapid price move near resolution is therefore not inherently suspicious.
The more meaningful questions may be who traded before that move, what information was publicly available at the time and whether that participant had access to something the broader market did not.
Different Markets, Different Surveillance Imperatives
Across all seven asset classes, the goal is fundamentally the same: identifying activity that may threaten fair and orderly markets. But the broader context for each one varies considerably.
Equities demand visibility across venues and trading sessions. Options require an understanding of related contracts and compressed lifecycles. Futures raise the challenge of truly continuous oversight. FX requires client and dealer context. Fixed income calls for intelligent use of expanding but uneven transparency. Digital assets require visibility across connected spot and derivatives markets. And prediction markets elevate participant identity and informational access.
That is ultimately the defining challenge of multi-asset surveillance: maintaining a consistent standard for market integrity without assuming that every market should be monitored in the same way.