The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suffered another setback on July 28 as the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned a ruling by the regulator ordering that SPIKES Index securities should be treated as futures rather than securities futures. The panel of judges called the SEC order “arbitrary and capricious.“
The decision relates to an order from 2020 in which the SEC exempted the SPIKES Index — a stock volatility index — from the definition of security futures, thus eliminating heavy taxes and other regulatory requirements attached to the term “security.“ The relief, according to the SEC, was intended to promote competition among volatility indexes.