The SPCTR futures will be the first S&P 500 sector indexes to trade on a futures exchange. The indexes are subsets of the benchmark S&P 500 Stock Price Index, which has traded on CME since 1982.
The new contracts are structured to enable customers to manage the risk of particular sectors in their overall market exposure or increase their exposure to individual sectors. CME also has announced that it will begin trading Energy SPCTR pending regulatory approval.
Each SPCTR contract is sized at $125 times the respective index price. The indexes are capitalization-weighted, with Technology representing 88 companies classified as part of either the Information Technology or Telecommunication Services sectors of the S&P 500, while the Financial Sector Index is composed of 81 equities as of August 31.
The 10 sector indexes of the S&P 500 include Consumer Discretionary, Consumer Staples, Energy, Financials, Health Care, Industrials, Information Technology, Materials, Telecommunication Services and Utilities. CME will name additional sectors for trading in the future.
Regular trading hours for S&P SPCTR futures on GLOBEX will be from 3:45 p.m Monday through Thursday (5:30 p.m. on Sundays and holidays) until 3:15 p.m. the following day. (All times are Central time.) The minimum tick size will be 0.10 index points equal to $12.50.
The new S&P 500 Sectors futures contracts follow the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), developed jointly by Standard & Poor's and Morgan Stanley Capital International.
Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (www.cme.com) is the largest futures exchange in the United States and the second largest exchange in the world for the trading of futures and options on futures. As an international marketplace, CME brings together buyers and sellers on its trading floors and virtually around the clock on its GLOBEX electronic trading platform. CME offers futures contracts and options on futures primarily in four product areas, interest rates, stock indexes, foreign exchange and commodities. The exchange moves about $1.5 billion per day in settlement payments and manages $27.1 billion in collateral deposits. CME is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc.
