NYMEX Aluminum Options Date Set; Futures Contract Details Finalized

The New York Mercantile Exchange board of directors has agreed to launch aluminum options on Friday, July 23; established August 1999 as the first month of trading for the aluminum futures contract to be launched on May 14; and selected two warehouses for delivery under the terms of the contract. Previously, the Exchange had announced that it would begin trading with July 1999 as the first of 25 listed contract months. Exchange President R. Patrick Thompson said that the change had been made at the request of the industry to allow participants additional time to have aluminum in place in the warehouses for the first delivery. Mr. Thompson also said that the list of approved warehouses had been narrowed to the Owensboro Riverport Authority in Kentucky and the R.J. Corman Railroad Company facility in Clarksville, Tennessee, in order to achieve Inventory tax parity. Other specifications for the new contracts include: Contract Unit: 44,000 pounds of aluminum; Trading Hours: Open outcry: 07:50 - 14:10, Mondays through Fridays; NYMEX ACCESS(SM) electronic trading: 16:00 - 07:40, Mondays through Thursdays, 19:00 - 07:40, Sundays; Quality Specifications: Primary aluminum meeting all of the requirements of the P1020A designation or primary aluminum of 99.7% purity with a maximum iron content of .20% and a maximum silicon content of .10%; Shapes: Low-profile sows or T-bars weighing 600 to 1,575 pounds; Price Quotation: Dollars and cents per pound; Minimum Price Quotation: $.0005 per pound; Maximum Daily Price Fluctuation:$.20 per pound above or below the previous day's settlement price, unless one of the two closest delivery months trades at or is offered or bid for two minutes at the limit. In that case, after a 15-minute halt, the market will reopen with the limits expanded by $.20 on either side of the previous limit. This can happen no more than twice in a session for a maximum $.60limit. Last Trading Day: The third to last business day of the delivery month. Under the terms of the 1994 NYMEX/COMEX merger, all NYMEX Division seat-owner members will be able to trade the COMEX Division aluminum futures and options contracts for their own account.