Eurex Waives Transaction Fees for Euribor Products Until Year-End

Eurex, the European derivatives market, wants to upgrade its money-market segment further. Eurex is waiving transaction fees for trading in Euribor derivatives (one-month and three-month Euribor futures as well as the option on these futures) until the end of the year. The exchange is thus extending by another nine months the fee waiver that has applied since the product launch in mid-September and was originally limited until the middle of March. Eurex has also announced that it will be introducing new functionality for its electronic trading system before the year is out that will support trading in money-market products in particular. Eurex plans to release the details regarding these innovations within the next few weeks. Since the start of EMU, the Eurex market share in the money-market segment has been about 12 percent - as compared with only around two percent of the volume going into the new year. Trading in the three-month Euribor future during the first seven weeks of 1999 matched the volume for all of last year with almost 600,000 contracts traded," Eurex attributed the derivatives' success to the high level of acceptance for the Euribor reference interest rate and to the rising number of market participants who are trading the three-month Euribor future on Eurex from Germany and especially the UK and France.