The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) was created in 1898 as a no-profit institution and is now listed on the NYSE, the biggest and most diversified futures market in the United States and the 2nd biggest in the world.

The “Chicago produce exchange” was founded in 1874 to provide systematic trading for a series of agricultural products. In 1919 it became the “Chicago Mercantile Exchange” (CME) and set up a clearing house to start trading in futures. In the 1970s it introduced futures contracts for currencies, metals and financial instruments.
In 2005, the volume of futures and options traded reached 1.1 billion contracts, ten times the number in 1990. Products traded include commodity futures, foreign exchange rates, interest rates, GSCI products, weather options, commodity options and equity indexes.
Such products are traded mainly on the GLOBEX system, available worldwide for 23 hours and 15 minutes a day, five days a week.
The CME recently agreed to acquire Cbot Holdings, the company that operates the Chicago Board of Trade. This consolidation will create the world’s biggest global market for futures and other derivative products (esp. those based on currencies, commodities, equity indexes and agriculture, from soya to ethanol), with an average of 9 million contracts a day, or $4,200 billion.
The new enterprise, to be called CME Group, will be the most important derivatives market in the world.
Since 1848, the year Illinois saw the arrival of the railroad, the telegraph and the first agricultural machines, the Chicago Board of Trade (Cbot) has been America’s most important market for raw materials like wheat, soya, maize and oats and has now attained similar status at a global level.
The Chicago Board of Options (Cboe), on the other hand, is the Cbot’s most recent new initiative (1973) and is designed to give concrete shape to the financial vocation that has emerged in the city in the meantime.
There is a protection system covering all the members of the clearing house and all investors against failure by any of them.
The deposits securing investors, provided by each member of the clearing house, are exclusively for coverage of their own business and that of their clients and may under no circumstances be used to cover defaults caused by others. Trading, compensation, placing and exclusion of securities is operated by the “CME clearing house”, a division of CME.
In the entire history of the CME, no member of the Clearing House has ever failed to honour its commitments and no client has ever lost money due to the insolvency of a member.
In 2002, CME “A” shares were listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).