This reduction comes as BTEX is seeing a growth in open interest and a rise in participation from the institutional trading community. BTEX also recently announced that a total of 2,109,670 contracts were traded in 2002, its first full year of operation.
"By lowering the minimum tick size, we will bring a better transaction price to the market and allow for greater participation from our expanding base of end-users, including market makers, e-locals, proprietary traders and institutional end-users," said Hank Mlynarski, President, BrokerTec Futures Exchange. "This, in turn, will create more efficiencies by further improving the quality and depth of our market."