CME Group’s market outages were resolved at 8:20 CT on 28 November, after a less-than-restful Thanksgiving for the organisation. But while it’s back to business as usual, the incident may have made the prospect of a second US futures exchange – BGC Group’s FMX – more appealing.
“The direct impact of the outage is immaterial to CME, but it provides upstart competitor FMX Futures (BGC) with marketing fodder as well as political capital, potentially leading to an exchange of futures for futures (EFF) rulemaking,” BofA Securities analysts observed.
FMX and CME Group have been embroiled in a fight for futures since the upstart exchange launched in late 2024. Scotto used the CME outage as an opportunity to highlight the importance of an alternative in the market, adding, “This is exactly why we are building a futures market alternative at FMX that can provide greater optionality and market resiliency for traders.”
READ MORE: Treasury futures fight intensifies between FMX and CME
The analysts explain, “Due to the vertical integration between CME’s exchange and clearinghouse, futures traders were trapped in their positions for hours on Friday. Positions initiated on CME’s exchange must be (1) cleared at CME’s clearinghouse; and (2) exited through CME’s exchange. In the event of an outage, traders are effectively stranded.”
On the outage, FMX CEO Louis Scotto commented, “While outages like this are unfortunate and often unavoidable, they underscore the need for more competition and choice in critical global markets like the US interest rate futures market, where trillions of dollars of notional volume trade every day.”
CME Group declined to provide a response to this point, but stated, “Our markets are open and operating as designed.”
At 5:00 CT on 28 November, after more than eight hours since the initial halts, CME Group provided its first update on term SOFR rates.
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“The CME Term SOFR rates are available via CME DataMine, Website and Globex notice. CME Streamline and CME Rest API are currently experiencing delays that may lead to delays with our distribution partners.”
Tradeweb’s connectivity to CME was fully restored by 14:10 GMT, according to a client notification, with all related services back to normal operation.
“Specifically, Tradeweb connectivity to CME Clearing for swaps is fully operational. Access to CME futures for basis trading via Tradeweb is now online and functioning as expected,” it elaborated.
An hour later at 6:00 CT, it announced that the EBC Market would open at 12:00 GMT, with all day and GFS orders cancelled.
At 6:50, it added that CME Globex Futures & Options markets would pre-open at 7:00 CT and open at 7:30.
By 8:00, the group shared that CME Globex FX Spot Plus markets would pre-open at 8:30 CT and open at 9:00, with all day orders and good-til-date orders (GTDs) cancelled. Acknowledged good-til-cancelled orders (GTCs) would remain active.
Less than half an hour before go-time, CME announced at 8:03 CT that CME Globex FX Spot Plus markets would open at 8:30 CT, with the same caveats.
EBS Direct’s re-opening time of 14:30 GMT was noted at 8:20 CT – or 14:20 GMT.
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