It is perhaps not surprising that some oil market participants have questioned Nymex's chances of capturing the European Brent market, given the historical difficulty in launching competing contracts, especially against long established incumbents such as London's IPE.
Other products to try and fail in similar competitive endeavours in recent months include Euronext Liffe's Eurodollar, Eurex US's Treasuries and Chicago Board of Trade's German debt contracts. However, Nymex has insisted that by offering traditional open outcry trading it is the exchange with the competitive advantage in this battle.
Following IPE's switch from Brent open outcry to screen trading in April, some thought that Nymex had missed the boat and by the time it opened in London the market would have learnt to trade electronically.
Early indications seemed to suggest this was exactly what would happen, and IPE now trades healthily on screen, veraging well over 100,000 contracts a day. But Nymex...