"As part of CME's ongoing program of attracting new customers to our products, we continue to look at emerging economies to expand our FX offering," said Rick Sears, Managing Director, CME Foreign Exchange. "As Israel's real GDP grew by 5 percent in 2005, driven in part by international trade, we see corresponding prospects for Shekel trading in the long-term, and CME is poised to help meet that need with this latest FX product offering."
The CME Israeli Shekel contract will be listed for trading exclusively on the CME Globex(R) electronic trading platform and is scheduled to launch at 5:00 p.m. Sunday, May 7, 2006 for the trade date of Monday, May 8, 2006. Trading hours will be from 5:00 p.m. until 4:00 p.m. the following day (Central time). The futures contract will have six expirations listed in the March quarterly cycle. The new contract will be sized at 1,000,000 Shekels and will have a minimum price movement, or tick size, of US$0.00001 per Shekel (or US$10.00). The contracts will be physically delivered.
CME offers the largest regulated FX derivatives trading complex in the world, providing users with liquid, transparent markets, guaranteed execution and central counterparty clearing risk management on 37 individual FX futures and 24 options on futures products. CME received FX Week's 2004 and 2005 eFX award for the best electronic futures platform. For first quarter 2006, CME FX averaged a record 406,000 contracts per day, up 38 percent over the same period in 2005, representing a notional value of $48 billion approximately 85 percent of which was traded electronically on the CME Globex electronic trading platform. Last year over 84 million FX contracts with a notional value of over $10.2 trillion traded at CME.
For more information on this product, please visit http://www.cme.com/shekel .
