NYMEX Clarified Procedures For Unanticipated Market Closures

New York Mercantile Exchange, Inc., today clarified its policies for unanticipated closures of the trading floors, specifically all days which are not approved holidays when a decision is made to close floor trading.

In the event of an unanticipated trading floor closure, NYMEX will announce electronic trading hours for its products on the CME Globex® and NYMEX ClearPort® electronic platforms.

Settlement prices will be determined for all futures markets available for electronic trading on CME Globex. These settlement prices will be derived from values available from trading on CME Globex and otherwise in accordance with existing settlement rules, at a time period consistent with settlements for existing floor hours or another time period determined and announced by NYMEX.

All NYMEX ClearPort markets will be settled using information gathered by NYMEX as per its normal procedures. All options markets will be settled utilizing the settlement prices in underlying futures contracts cited above, loaded into the NYMEX-approved model which will have relevant data (including volatilities, skews, pivots), carried over from the preceding business day.

The 2007 NYMEX holiday schedule is available at www.nymex.com.