In between touting the Intercontinental Exchange’s new forex offering and Russell contract transition, ICE Chairman and CEO Jeff Sprecher offered some thoughts about the current Wall Street crisis at the Profit and Loss Forex Network conference in Chicago today.
“This is clearly a global crisis that we’re under. Volatility has been the order of the day, or for many FX traders, the order of the year,” Sprecher said of the current Wall Street crisis, adding that the job of exchange leaders is to “install as much confidence as our circumstances will allow and address the reality of the situation while working to provide solutions as quickly as we can.”
Post-Wall Street meltdown, Sprecher said that increased regulation in currency and commodity trading was “almost a foregone conclusion.” He urged conference attendees to speak up during the regulatory debate because “the stakes for all of us are enormous.”
He remained optimistic about the industry’s overall ability to weather the storm, saying, “The U.S. economy and the foreign exchange and derivatives industry will come out of this downturn smarter, stronger and more innovative than ever.”
Today ICE announced it will launch a new product called ICE Millions, million-currency-unit versions of 12 existing foreign exchange futures contracts, in November. The contracts will be sized at ten times the notional value of the existing ICE FX futures and options contracts. Sprecher said the new product is geared towards OTC currency traders and “by offering currency futures contracts that mirror the cash markets, we’ve enhanced the efficiency by bringing centralized clearing to those.”
This week, ICE completed its transition of the Russell contracts to its ICE Futures U.S. platform per its exclusive license agreement with Russell signed in June 2007. “Our Russell contracts are off to a great start. We had volume in our mini and full size Russell 2000 contracts set records two times last week and we believe we’ll continue to grow interest as market participants realize the advantage of trading on a central counterparty platform,” Sprecher said.
