I tried to enter a trade against the MATIF exchange in France in my IB account and the trade was rejected with the message "No trading permission, regulatory restriction". I was under the impression that foreign commodities (wheat, gold, etc.) could be traded at will, but that foreign "financial" futures such as indices (FTSE 100) and possibly bonds needed to be cleared by the CFTC first (under section 10.30 with a no action letter). Is this not the case? Even if it was according to the CFTC website MATIF is allowed to trade. So why is IB not allowing me to trade it? As a note I verified I do have market permissions for it. http://services.cftc.gov/sirt/sirt.aspx?Topic=ForeignPart30Exemptions This implies non-index based futures are no restricted: http://www.cftc.gov/international/foreignmarketsandproducts/foreignproducts.html