The CFTC wants to give back a registration exemption it deleted in 2012, and to lift a small pool threshold to more than its own inflation figure

The exemption the CFTC proposed on Tuesday is one the same agency deleted in 2012.

Former Regulation 4.13(a)(4) let the operator of a private commodity pool skip registration if every participant was a sophisticated investor. The Commission took it away in the rulemaking that followed the financial crisis, deciding then that certain previously exempt pool operators should register and should report information similar to Form PF. The proposal published on Tuesday would put the paragraph back, narrowed to advisers the Securities and Exchange Commission already registers.

What the exemption would cover

Proposed Regulation 4.13(a)(4) would exempt a registered investment adviser from commodity pool operator registration for any pool that meets its conditions. Proposed Regulation 4.14(a)(8) does the same for the trading adviser. The argument in the preamble is duplication rather than deregulation for its own sake: an adviser inside the Investment Advisers Act is already examined, already reporting, and in many cases already filing Form PF, so a second federal registration buys the public little.

Chairman Michael S. Selig put it in the administration's own terms. "This proposal is yet another step to unwind overregulation and cut red tape for American businesses while still preserving market integrity," he said in the release announcing it.

The threshold, and the agency's own arithmetic

The small pool exemption is older and simpler. An operator running pools with no more than 15 participants and no more than $400,000 of gross capital contributions across all of them does not have to register. That figure was set in 2003, when the Commission doubled the $200,000 it had carried since 1981.

The proposal doubles it again, to $800,000. What makes the passage worth reading is that the Commission shows the working and then departs from it. It ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator on the CPI-U and found that $400,000 in January 2003 buys what $735,097 buys in July 2026. It then proposed rounding to the nearest hundred thousand, which is $64,903 more, and gave two reasons in plain sight: a round number is easier for an operator to calculate against, and the extra sum is a buffer against inflation still to come.

The 15-participant limit does not move. Neither do the exclusions that keep certain contributions out of the total.

Why a rule rather than a letter

Most of this already exists in a staff letter. On 19 December 2025 the Market Participants Division issued Letter 25-50, which answered a request from the Managed Funds Association and said staff would not recommend enforcement against a qualifying adviser that failed to register. In February the division reissued the same content as Letter 26-06, adding a position for pool operators who had delegated their duties to somebody now relying on the first letter.

A no-action letter is a promise from a division, not a rule. The proposal says formal rulemaking is needed here to make the position durable, transparent and uniformly applicable, and it notes a mechanical consequence of the arrangement it would replace: the National Futures Association has to enter each firm's reliance on the letter into its systems by hand.

Comments close 45 days after the proposal appears in the Federal Register. It has not appeared yet.