Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (CME), the largest U.S. futures exchange, today announced that it set a new total single-day trading volume record on Friday, May 7 of 6.5 million contracts, exclusive of CME's non-traditional TRAKRS contracts.
Friday's volume topped the previous single-day record of 5.5 million contracts set on March 5, 2004. Total volume on GLOBEX reached 2.85 million contracts, surpassing the previous record of 2.6 million contracts traded on March 11, 2004. The 3.67 million contracts traded on CME's trading floors also was an all-time record.
Interest rate products reached a record 4.6 million contracts. A record 3.2 million Eurodollar futures and 1.3 million Eurodollar options were traded. Also on Friday, more than 1.1 million Eurodollar futures contracts on GLOBEX were traded, surpassing by 39 percent the previous record of 811,443 set on April 21, 2004.
The overall volume record at CME included strength in all CME product areas, with more than 1.5 million E-mini equity index contracts, more than 250,000 foreign exchange contracts, and commodity contracts approached 50,000. Additional daily individual product records worth noting included the Mexican Peso futures on GLOBEX with more than 10,000 contracts and the E-mini S&P 400 Midcap which totaled approximately 24,000 contracts.
Open interest in all CME products stood at almost 38 million contracts at the end of Friday's trading session, and interest rate product open interest exceeded the 20 million level, with Eurodollar futures and options both at record open interest levels. Open interest represents contract positions which remain open at the end of the trading day. The CME Clearing House, the largest derivatives clearing house in the world, cleared approximately 11 million matched trades, as the Chicago Board of Trade also set a daily volume record with 4.4 million contracts traded on Friday.