I have previously mentioned that market tops are inclusive, we see lots of mergers. The two Chicago Exhcanges could never get together because individual memebers opposed it. Now that each has gone public, a merger was possible. This proves that it took a special happening to make this inclusion happen. And inclusive it is. The combined exchanges trade 9 million contracts a day for a notional $23 Trillion dollars in contracts A DAY!
You can read the press release about the merger of the Chicago Mercantile and Chicago Board of Trade here. I put the Wed Oct 18 issue of the WSJ on reserve in the library. There is extensive coverage of the merger as well as interesting historical articles about the exchanges. From a purely accounting standpoint, futures contracts are not subject to Sarbanes Oxley, unlike corporate reports. Hence there has not been any holding back due to SARBOX. After the dot com collapse and NASD meltdown of 80+%, the futures exchanges surged ahead in volume with hedge funds leading the way. And the new bull markets in commodities have also increased trading. I have been a licensed commodity trader and been on the floor of the CBOT a couple of times, very exciting to say the least. I will post a summary of futures trading on WEB CT for the various classes. The new exchange trades under the symbol BOT, the NYSE trades under NYX. Take a look at how they are doing on www.stockcharts.com.
Those of you wanting to relax and learn a bit about futures might check out the Eddie Murphy movie Trading Places. There is a good explanation of trading as Murphy is introduced to futures trading and at the end Akryod and Murphy run the market the other way, in the expiring month there are no limit moves on contract price. Learn more at www.cme.com.
DLE
Professor Elam 
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