Booming stock and grain prices had business humming on the floors of Chicago exchanges last month.
With short supplies evident for corn and wheat, agriculture futures trading jumped by 93 percent in February on the Chicago Board of Trade, to 5.2 million contracts from 2.7 million a year earlier. Overall, the CBOT reported the fifth-highest month in exchange history at 21.2 million contracts, which was up about 27 percent from a year earlier.
At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, contracts related to stock market indexes were posting records for February, but overall the exchange total of 18.2 million trailed a year earlier by 6.4 percent. Still, volume was 13.6 percent ahead of January’s volume. Counting only “pit-traded” volume, as does the CBOT, the Merc traded 16.7 million contracts in February.
The Chicago Stock Exchange reported record average volume of 16.4 million shares a day.
Total volume of 329.4 million, up 20 percent from a year earlier, was the sixth-highest month in exchange history and total trades of 565,790 represented a 32 percent increase from February 1995.
