January
The year began with market participants still getting used to the departure of Eurex CEO Rudi Ferscha over the holiday period, after five years at the helm of one the world's largest futures exchanges. Ferscha's replacement would have to establish a plan to take the Swiss/German exchange forward in the wake of the failure of its Eurex US project; in the same week as the departure was announced, FO Week also revealed that Eurex had been in talks with other US exchanges, understood to include Philadelphia Stock Exchange and Archipelago, about a partnership deal to revive Eurex's moribund American subsidiary.
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) became the aggressor in transatlantic commodities competition by announcing that it planned to list its own version of New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex)'s WTI crude oil contract for fully-electronic trading on its London-based ICE Futures platform. Traders backed the concept of a screen-traded WTI contract at...