Posts Tagged ‘CME Group’
Monday, December 19th, 2011
As we now are weeks in the debacle following the bankruptcy of MF Global on Oct. 31, the latest casualty has just been announced. Already individual traders, commodity trading advisers and introducing brokers have felt sting, but now charitable foundations are beginning to as well. According to Reuters, CME Group, which has given $22 million to Chicago-area schools and charities over the past five years, has stopped making grants through its main foundation, citing the collapse of MF Global. (more…)
Tags: CME Group, MF Global, mfgi
Posted in General, MF Global | No Comments »
Sunday, November 20th, 2011
It has been nearly three weeks since MF Global Holdings Ltd. filed for bankruptcy and its futures commission merchant and broker/dealer went into liquidation and more than three weeks since we learned that they were in distress, yet we seem further away from an explanation as to what happened. (more…)
Tags: CFTC, CME Group, Gary Gensler
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, October 10th, 2011
When CME Group first announced that it would take a majority stake in Dow Jones Indexes a year ago my first thought was to ask if there would be any antitrust issues as CME Group has exclusive licenses with Standard & poor’s (a competitor to Dow Jones Indexes) to list futures products on its S&P 500 index as well as others. Neither Dow Jones Indexes nor CME Group seemed to worry it was an issue at the time. (more…)
Tags: CME Group, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Mergers
Posted in Buy outs, Mergers | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
Last week I wrote a blog criticizing a Wall Street Journal headline that related CME Group to its pork belly contract. I noted how connecting the CME Group to the belly contract was a bit of a cliché and an old and tired one at that. CME Group and the futures industry in general moved well past its agricultural roots decades ago and to keep bringing up that comparison is a sign that you are not keeping up with the industry, which is no longer niche but a vital part of our financial landscape. (more…)
Tags: CME Group
Posted in General | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
When I started at Futures more than a decade ago I realized that while the futures industry was a big deal in Chicago and for us who worked in it (I already had been working in the industry for more than a decade at the time), I also learned that the wider business media community viewed it as a sleepy backwater and knew little about it.
In the last 10 years, however, things have changed as futures’ volume exploded, exchanges became public companies and big players in mergers and acquisitions, and assets allocated to futures based investment strategies have grown by a factor of 7X.
(more…)
Tags: CME Group
Posted in Floor, General, Markets | No Comments »
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
It was nearly two years ago when ELX Futures L.P. proudly announced that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) had approved their exchange of futures for futures (EFF) rule.
It was a considerable victory for the upstart exchange because it would make it easier for end users to transfer their open interest to its clearinghouse from the CME Group clearinghouse or vice versa. (more…)
Tags: CFTC, CME Group, EFFs, ELX Futures, futures exchanges
Posted in Markets, Regulatory/actions | No Comments »
Monday, March 7th, 2011
Ever since the announcement that NYSE Euronext and Deustche Borse were in advanced merger talks people have been speculating on whether CME Group, the other 800-pound gorilla in the room, would attempt a counter offer for fear of becoming undersized relatively.
(more…)
Tags: CME Group
Posted in Mergers, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, October 29th, 2010
On the morning of the day the CME Group would present its Fred Arditti Innovation Award I read small item on the Financial Times back page on French economist Benoit Mandelbrot who had passed away the week before. The story pointed out how the recent financial crisis vindicated Mandelbrot’s work, which “disproved the precepts of the efficient market half a century ago” even though it is still be taught as gospel today. (more…)
Tags: CME Group, fat tails, Managed Futures
Posted in General | No Comments »
During the past 40 years — Futures marks its 40th birthday this month, which we plan on celebrating with special articles all year long — the industry has gone through dramatic changes. The days of using these markets only to hedge grains and livestock are long gone, and along the way, currencies, bonds and stocks — traded by hedgers and speculators alike — joined the commodities trading club. Options and ETFs also would join, and soon the entire world got into the business. Exchanges popped up in Europe and South America, Asia futures trading expanded beyond Japan. And the Germans launched an electronic exchange, pushing the floor-centric U.S. exchanges to jump on board. Today trading is a 24/7 business. Derivatives are traded by all levels of speculators, fund managers, investment banks and corporations. Even OPEC uses the market, as do central banks. (more…)