Your editorial “The cost of open outcry” was just plain wrong and grossly misled readers when it stated that “by failing to keep up with the times, the [Chicago] exchanges have undermined their growth prospects.”
The real facts speak for themselves. Average daily volume in Chicago Mercantile Exchange products has quadrupled during the last five years from nearly 800,000 contracts per day in 1999 to more than 3.2 million so far in 2004. Nearly all of this spectacular growth has come from electronic trading, which now comprises 94 percent of all stock index futures trading, 67 percent of all foreign exchange trading and 60 percent of all Eurodollar futures trading at the CME.
Your editorial also failed to mention that CME trades more contracts electronically each day than Euronext.liffe, our nearest competitor, and that average daily volume in Euronext.liffe’s Eurodollar futures contracts after five months of trading only constitutes approximately 1 percent of CME’s 1.2 million contracts per day.
And you omitted any mention of the fact that in the second quarter of 2004 CME and the Chicago Board of Trade together comprised more than 5.8 million futures and options-on-futures contracts in daily trading, compared to only 4.4 million contracts at Eurex and Euronext.liffe.
Nor did you mention that CME’s Globex system, which operates 23 1/2 hours a day around the globe, is today regarded as a leading electronic trading platform in terms of distribution, capacity, reliability, speed and functionality.
Furthermore, since becoming the first and only publicly traded financial exchange in the U.S., CME’s stock price has increased 259 percent, making it one of the most successful initial public offerings of the last two years and catapulting CME into the Russell 1000 Index.
Our shareholders and investors, and the research analysts who follow our industry, seem to have a dramatically different view of our business than the writer of your editorial.
How can the Tribune so mischaracterize this record of achievement?
