Electronic Trading Around the Clock From Around the World
CME pioneered the concept of electronic trading of derivatives contracts in 1987. After years of careful planning, negotiating and development, CME launched the CME® Globex® global electronic trading platform in 1992. See  History of CME Globex to find out more about the evolution of this revolutionary concept.

Benefits of CME Globex
During the last decade, CME Globex has revolutionized the way derivatives products are traded worldwide. Its success is due to a variety of factors, including demand for the premier products listed and traded on CME Globex, open customer access enabling the free flow of information and direct execution, global customer reach, virtual 24-hour trading, speed of execution, transparency, anonymity and market integrity.

Nearly all CME products trade on CME Globex. Market participants come to CME Globex to trade the most actively traded futures contracts in the world, including our flagship CME Eurodollar contract, the CME S&P 500® and CME NASDAQ-100® indexes, and CME Foreign Exchange (FX) futures and options on futures contracts. (Some of these products, including Eurodollars, trade side-by-side on the CME trading floor and on CME Globex during the trading day.)

The introduction of the wildly popular CME E-mini(TM) S&P 500 product in 1997 opened a new chapter in electronic trading at CME. Today, the E-mini equity index product suite includes the CME E-mini S&P 500, CME E-mini NASDAQ-100 and the CME E-mini Russell 2000®. These smaller-sized products traded a staggering 171,092,756 million contracts in 2002 and 58,126,634 million contracts in the first quarter of 2003, making them the fastest growing products in CME history at an average of 130% over the past three years.

On its first day of business in June 1992, 2,063 futures contracts traded on CME Globex. Today, an average of more than one million contracts a day are traded on CME Globex, accounting for over 50% of total CME volume. The diversity of the listed products, market liquidity and the elimination of a membership requirement to trade on CME Globex, continue to attract additional customers, further enhancing liquidity and fueling growth.

With the guarantee of the CME Clearing House, which backs every transaction and continuous improvements in speed, reliability and functionality, the CME Globex platform provides unmatched value in the electronic trading world with rapid-fire response times, first-rate customer support, market integrity and, above all, a suite of trading products second to none. See  eTrading at CME to learn more about how to get started trading on CME Globex today.