CME, the world's largest and most diverse financial exchange, today announced record trading activity at the exchange on Friday, December 1, 2006, with a total of 10,997,315 futures and options on futures contracts traded*. This eclipsed the previous record of 10,675,578 set on September 1, 2005, and was more than double the exchange's average daily volume of 5.3 million contracts for November. Record high electronic trading activity drove much of Friday's volume with 8,035,059 contracts, 73 percent of total volume, traded on the CME Globex(R) electronic trading program. CME's previous electronic trading record was 7,684,329 set on June 8, 2006.
CME Foreign Exchange (FX) products also set an electronic record with 726,660 contracts traded, reflecting notional value of $93.5 billion. The previous electronic record for CME FX futures and options on futures contracts was 695,927 contracts set on May 17, 2006. Open interest in FX futures and options on futures reached a new level at 1,489,743 positions. Within the FX product group, CME British Pound futures set a new record of 130,521 contracts, with notional value of $16.2 billion.
Open interest in CME Interest Rate futures was at an all-time high with 10,992,812 positions. Open interest is the number of contracts that have been opened with either a purchase or sale, but not closed with an offsetting transaction.
CME ( http://www.cme.com ) is the world's largest and most diverse financial exchange. As an international marketplace, CME brings together buyers and sellers on the CME Globex(R) electronic trading platform and on its trading floors. CME offers futures and options on futures in these product areas: interest rates, stock indexes, foreign exchange, agricultural commodities, energy, and alternative investment products such as weather, real estate and economic derivatives. CME is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc. (NYSE, Nasdaq: CME), which is part of the Russell 1000(R) Index and the S&P 500(R) Index.
* All volume and open interest numbers exclude non-traditional TRAKRS(TM) products and auction-traded products.
