Extended Chicago Board hours begin Sunday

CME Group, which owns and operates the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile trade, said its new 21-hour prolonged trading day will begin Sunday.

CME won approval for the growth from 17 hours from the Commodity Futures Exchange Commission on Friday after revising its original request, which would have extensive trading to 22 hours.

The new hours for granule trading on the Chicago Board will be from 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. CT Sunday to Friday. Trading will cease every day between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.

The older system began electronic trading on CME’s Globex platform at 6 p.m. through 7:30 a.m., with a two-hour hiatus until open outcry began in the pits at the Chicago Board of Trade head office on LaSalle Street in Chicago. Open outcry closed at 1:15, with trading down until continuation of the electronic market at 6 p.m.

Under the new system, open outcry will persist to run between 9:30 a.m. and 1:15 p.m., and the 1:15 p.m. price will be the market standard for following trades into the next day. But trading will persist from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. in the morning and until 2 p.m. in the afternoon.

The prolonged hours had been set to meet antagonism from the Intercontinental Exchange, the Atlanta and London-based rival with a 22-hour trading agenda that has already set a strong world energy trade and this month had added undeveloped futures to its menu.

With the international Exchange poised to take a chunk of what has been the Chicago Board’s long dominance of U.S. grain markets, the Chicago Board had announced extended hours. But agricultural groups protested, saying the 22 hour trading day would not allow sufficient time to complete back-office settlements.

The new hours leave unaffected another issue; the fact that trading now will occur through the 7:30 a.m. releases of U.S. Department of farming crop reports that frequently are strong market Chicago movers.