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CME Group, the world's largest and most diverse exchange and the largest regulated marketplace for foreign exchange (FX) trading, today announced that it plans to offer electronic trading for weekly FX options on futures with American-style expiration. Beginning Monday, September 10, the weekly options on the following currencies, all trading against the U.S. dollar, will be available virtually 24 hours a day on the CME Globex(R) electronic trading platform: Euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar and Australian dollar.
"The tremendous growth we have seen this year in CME Group's FX options volume reflects the market's interest in an effective and efficient electronic execution platform for FX options," said Derek Sammann, Managing Director, CME Group FX Products. "We see increasing demand from our global customer base to provide further trading efficiencies in these products so we will continue to serve the global FX market by expanding electronic access to our markets, adding new options trading functionality and developing innovative new products. The result of these efforts is that last month 49 percent of our FX options traded electronically compared to 12 percent in August 2006. In addition, electronic volume increased six-fold from August 2006 and total options volume was up 102 percent."
For the American-style FX options with quarterly expiration, the exchange plans to initiate electronic trading of the third and fourth quarterly options contracts at the end of September. In addition, Horizontal and Risk Reversal option strategies for the most actively-traded American-style FX options will be launched on CME Globex. CME Group first expanded electronic trading of American-style FX options when it initiated side-by-side trading of these contracts in December 2006.
CME Group offers the world's largest regulated FX trading complex and the second largest electronic marketplace for FX trading in the world. The exchange provides users with liquid, transparent markets, guaranteed execution and central counterparty clearing risk management on 41 individual FX futures and 31 options on futures products. Last year, over 114 million FX contracts with a notional value of over $13.9 trillion traded at CME Group. For more information on CME Group FX products, visit http://www.cme.com/fx.
CME Group (http://www.cmegroup.com) is the world's largest and most diverse exchange. Formed by the 2007 merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), CME Group serves the risk management needs of customers around the globe. As an international marketplace, CME Group brings buyers and sellers together on the CME Globex electronic trading platform and on its trading floors. CME Group offers the widest range of benchmark products available across all major asset classes, including futures and options based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, agricultural commodities, and alternative investment products such as weather and real estate. CME Group is traded on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ under the symbol "CME."
