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This paper summarizes the requirements of rule amendments promulgated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 2018 regarding the duties of Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) of swap dealers, major swap participants, and futures commission merchants (collectively, Registrants) and the requirements for preparing, certifying and furnishing to the CFTC the CCO’s annual report.

This paper provides a close analysis of the CFTC’s final rule amendments that make clarifications regarding the CCO’s duties and seek to harmonize with similar rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) applicable to security-based swap dealers.It also analyzes rule amendments for the CCO’s report that provide clarifications and simplify certain requirements.In each case, it discusses comments from the public and the CFTC’s responses to those comments.

This paper finds that the rule amendments provide a number of helpful clarifications and simplify certain existing requirements for Registrants and their CCOs subject to the rules.While the rules overall achieve greater harmonization with similar rules of the SEC governing CCOs of security-based swap dealers, this paper notes that care will need to be taken by CFTC Registrants who also become registered with the SEC to be cognizant of remaining differences between the CFTC’s and SEC’s rules in order to ensure compliance with the rules of each agency.

This paper provides valuable information regarding the duties of CCOs of Registrants and CCO annual report requirements from an experienced lawyer focused on commodities, futures, derivatives, energy, corporate, and securities regulatory matters.

The alert endeavors to clarify the current state of play regarding the registration requirements for commodity pool operators (CPOs) and to discuss certain exemptions from registration and no‐action relief that may be applicable to sponsors of private funds.

The authors' approach is focused on the practical steps a fund sponsor may need to take to claim an exemption from the CPO registration requirements. The authors obtained the research from publicly available CFTC sources.

Although many private equity funds may be exempt from the CPO registration requirements, many of the CFTC's exemptions are not self‐executing and necessitate ongoing action by the fund sponsor.

Before entering into any swaps, a sponsor of a private fund should consider whether the swap transaction will impact any exemptive relief currently claimed by the sponsor and whether any further CFTC action is required as a result of such transaction.

The article should provide a roadmap of the possible exemptions from CPO registration for sponsors of private funds.