As I perused the market alerts on my computer this morning three headlines caught my eye. The first was a report, citing a story in the Wall Street Journal online edition, that UBS was expected to report huge third quarter losses in fixed income assets. The second was that Citigroup announced that it expected third quarter profits to fall 60% from 2006 levels due to write downs from unsold debt and from big losses in the subprime sector. The third, of course and at this point I can’t say unexpectedly, was that U.S. stocks opened higher and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had surpassed the 14,000 level.

This comes on the heels of a slew of negative housing numbers last week, which the market sloughed off as it pressed towards new highs. The common theme appears to be that all this bad news will force the Fed to continue to lower interest rates and that is good for equities. But at some point doesn’t all this news have to hurt the market? It certainly has hurt the dollar, which is at historic lows, trading below .78.

Last Wednesday evening the CME Group held a party at a popular Chicago night spot celebrating its recent merger with the Chicago Board of Trade and the anniversaries of many products from both the Merc and the CBOT. This year is the 35-year anniversary of currency futures, 30-year anniversary of U.S. Treasury bond futures, the 25-year anniversary of S&P 500 futures and Treasury notes, the 15-year anniversary of Globex and the 10-year anniversary of E-Mini S&P 500 and Dow futures. They also listed 2007 as the 130-year anniversary of wheat, corn and oat futures but who can remember that far back?

One product line not having an anniversary is the CBOT metals complex. The CBOT electronic gold and silver contracts were making a serious charge at the supremacy of Comex in precious metals with CBOT gold regularly achieving a 50% plus market share of domestic gold contracts by the fall of 2006. The competition appeared to be near a tipping point last December when Comex finally allowed its contracts to trade electronically during the day. When Comex metals were placed on Globex, Dec. 5, it began to win back its market share and when the CME/CBOT merger became final, many people thought that the CBOT metals complex would be a casualty. The service agreement between the CME and the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) would prevent CME Group from placing the CBOT metals on Globex.

But word is that CME Group has not given up on the CBOT metals complex and according to people in the know an announcement could come out as soon as this week. Stay tuned.