RJO's volume accounted for more than 3 percent of the total customer volume of each of the nation's two largest futures exchanges - the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). At the CME, RJO accounted for 15 percent of all customer agricultural commodity transactions and 4.6 percent of interest rate futures and options trades. At the CBOT, RJO increased its customer agricultural product market share from 4.83 percent in 2002 to 6.57 in 2003, and its percentage of interest rate transactions from 1.6 in 2002 to 2.07 in 2003.
"For the past several years, RJO has focused on steady, organic growth in its trading and services offerings, and it is paying off in impressive gains on all exchanges," said RJO Chief Executive Officer Gerald Corcoran.
By far the most actively traded products by RJO's customers in 2003 were the CME's Eurodollar futures at 8.6 million contracts and options on Eurodollar futures at 2.7 million trades. RJO's customer volume ranks 5th among 81 firms trading Eurodollar futures and 8th among 54 firms trading Eurodollar options at the CME.
Among other strong gains in 2003, RJO's customer volume grew its business in executing and clearing transactions in the S&P 500 E-Mini futures at the CME, posting 2,252,897 trades - compared to 435,500 in 2002 and 117,294 in 2001. Corcoran said RJO's expanded business relationships with electronic brokerages such as TradeStation and Terra Nova Trading helped boost RJO's growth in S&P E-Mini trading by more than 400 percent.
"RJO was one of the first firms to fully embrace the electronic trading revolution now sweeping through the equity and derivatives markets," Corcoran noted.
Among other accomplishments in 2003, Corcoran pointed out that RJO's customer volume accounted for nearly 10 percent of all CBOT Soybean futures contracts trades and 8.3 percent of CBOT corn futures contracts. At the CME, RJO's customer volume maintained a healthy market share (17.8 percent) of live cattle futures trades and remained the top broker for feeder cattle futures with 22 percent of the volume.
