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CME Group, the world's largest and most diverse exchange, today announced that it has successfully migrated e-cbot interest rate futures and options on futures to its CME Globex(R) electronic trading platform. E-cbot agricultural and equity index products were integrated onto the platform on January 14. With the addition of these products, CME Group now offers access to all major asset classes from a single electronic trading platform.
"The successful completion of migrating e-cbot agricultural, equity index and interest rate contracts onto CME Globex is not an end point as much as it is a new beginning for electronic trading at CME Group," said CME Group Executive Chairman Terry Duffy. "By consolidating our trading technology onto one platform, customers have the opportunity to streamline their own operations and benefit from increased efficiencies and cost effectiveness created by the CME/CBOT merger. The CME Globex platform is widely recognized as the leading electronic trading platform, noted for its speed, reliability and scalability. It provides an unparalleled distribution of our products to a customer base spread across the world in more than 83 countries."
"We have reached a key milestone in our merger. Our customers who trade both CME and CBOT products electronically will now benefit from reduced front-end development and system costs as well as from new trading opportunities across every major asset class," said CME Group Chief Executive Officer Craig Donohue. "In the coming months, we will continue our leadership in the industry by upgrading our electronic trading platform that will significantly reduce message response time, already among the fastest in the industry. And later this year, we will launch selected cross-product and cross-exchange spread functionality, further enhancing our customers' ability to trade our products."
In 2007, electronically traded CBOT interest futures and options on futures averaged 3,231,631 contracts a day, up 27 percent from 2006. Last year, average daily volume for all products at CME Group was 11 million contracts on a pro forma basis of which approximately 80 percent traded electronically.
For information on the revised trading hours for CBOT interest rate products, please visit www.cmegroup.com/trading/interest-rates/online-marketing/ir-update.html. In addition to the electronic trading platform migration, CME's trading floors will migrate completely from 20 S. Wacker Drive to the CBOT building at 141 W. Jackson during the second quarter of 2008.
CME Group interest rate products span the entire U.S. dollar denominated yield curve and are among the world's most actively traded futures and options on futures contracts. They are an important risk management tool for managing short-, medium- and long-term interest rate risk with products based on Eurodollars, U.S. Treasuries, swaps and other dollar-related instruments as well as products for managing interest rate risk in Europe and Japan. In 2007, an average of 6.9 million interest rate contracts a day traded at CME Group.
CME Group (http://www.cmegroup.com) is the world's largest and most diverse exchange. Formed by the 2007 merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), CME Group serves the risk management needs of customers around the globe. As an international marketplace, CME Group brings buyers and sellers together on the CME Globex electronic trading platform and on its trading floors. CME Group offers the widest range of benchmark products available across all major asset classes, including futures and options based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, agricultural commodities, and alternative investment products such as weather and real estate. CME Group is traded on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ under the symbol "CME."
