Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (CME) today announced that performance upgrades to advance GLOBEX® response times and throughput originally scheduled for later in 2004 will be accelerated and implemented on Sunday, June 27 (trade date June 28).
These enhancements are driven by continued growth of Eurodollars on GLOBEX, up more than 360 percent in the first quarter of 2004 versus the same period last year.
A total of 811,443 Eurodollar futures contracts were traded April 21, 2004, on GLOBEX surpassing by 32 percent the previous record of 615,932 set on April 5, 2004. In April, CME is averaging nearly 390,000 Eurodollar futures on GLOBEX per day, representing nearly 30 percent of the total Eurodollar futures volume at CME month-to-date.
In addition to the performance upgrades that will be implemented, CME will also roll out other electronic interest rate trading initiatives, including FRA Switches and enhanced Eurodollar Options on GLOBEX. The release of implied butterfly spread functionality for Eurodollars on GLOBEX, previously scheduled for Sunday, May 16, 2004 (trade date May 17), is now scheduled for Sunday, September 5, 2004 (trade date September 6) to allow for the above upgrade and to provide sufficient time for CME and customer testing and deployment.