CME Group, the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, today announced the launch of three new E-micro Forex futures contracts scheduled for Sunday, December 19, for trade date Monday, December 20. These contracts will be listed with, and subject to, the rules and regulations of CME.
"These three new currency pairs will complement our existing suite of E-micro Forex contracts and provide our retail customers with a product that has the right risk/reward ratio for their financial risk management needs," said Derek Sammann, CME Group’s managing director of FX and Interest Rate Products. "We continue to see strong growth in our existing E-micro contracts with average daily volume up 115 percent versus last year. The main reasons for this growth are CME Group’s highly liquid and transparent markets, better customer awareness of the benefits of counterparty risk mitigation and our recent shift to physical delivery, which makes it easier to offset risk with our standard FX futures contracts."
The new currency pairs include the Canadian dollar, Japanese yen and Swiss franc and will be quoted in IMM (American) terms, or U.S. dollars per foreign units. This is in addition to the six existing E-micro Forex futures contracts launched in 2009, which are quoted in interbank (European) terms and include the Euro, British pound, Australian dollar, Japanese yen, Swiss franc and Canadian dollar.
CME Group’s E-micro Forex contracts represent one-tenth the size of the corresponding FX contracts, making them accessible to active individual and retail traders and allowing for perfect offsets with their corresponding standard-size FX futures. The contracts are physically delivered and exclusively traded on the CME Globex electronic trading platform.
CME Group is the largest regulated FX marketplace in the world and offers an innovative global product suite of 52 futures and 31 options contracts. CME FX volume averages 930,000 contracts per day in 2010, up 49 percent versus 2009, reflecting average daily notional value of $120 billion. November E-micro Forex average daily volume was more than 7,800 contracts, up nearly 115 percent compared to November 2009.
