Chicago Board of Trade (CBoT) faced the possibility of having to ditch its successful precious metal contracts last week after its merger with Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) because of the non-compete clause signed by New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) when it listed its own rival metals suite on CME's Globex platform.
The Chicago merger deal would see all electronic contracts on both exchanges move to Globex (see story p12), including contracts traded on the E-CBoT platform, the system used to host CBoT's precious metal suite.
A source close to Nymex's metals division Comex told FO Week that the non-compete clause between Nymex and CME would extend to Comex metals contracts. This would not prevent CBoT's metals contracts remaining on E-CBoT, powered by Atos Euronext Market Solutions (AEMS) but that appeared unlikely, especially at a licensing cost paid to AEMS of $20-25m per year.