CME Group

On a July morning in 2007, two Chicago institutions that had spent more than a century competing merged into a single entity. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, founded in 1898 as a butter and egg board, joined with the Chicago Board of Trade, which had been trading grain since 1848. The $11.9 billion deal created CME Group, instantly the world's largest derivatives exchange. Within a year, the company added the New York Mercantile Exchange and the Commodity Exchange for $9.6 billion, bringing energy and metals into the fold. A 2012 purchase of the Kansas City Board of Trade added hard red winter wheat. In 2018, CME acquired NEX Group for $5.5 billion, gaining BrokerTec and EBS, platforms that dominate fixed-income and foreign exchange electronic trading. The company also holds a 27% stake in S&P Dow Jones Indices.

CME operates four designated contract markets: CME, CBOT, NYMEX, and COMEX. Its Globex electronic platform runs 24 hours a day, connecting traders in roughly 150 countries. In 2025, over 7 billion futures and options contracts changed hands on its systems, with average daily volume exceeding 28 million. Interest rate products tied to SOFR and U.S. Treasuries drove 51% of that volume. Equity index futures, led by the E-mini S&P 500, accounted for 26%. Energy made up 10%, agriculture 7%, currencies and metals 3% each. Cryptocurrency futures, launched in 2017, represent a small but growing slice. CME Clearing acts as the central counterparty for every trade, guaranteeing performance and managing risk.

Revenue for 2024 reached $6.1 billion, with clearing and transaction fees contributing 81%, market data fees 12%, and access fees 7%. Net income hit $3.2 billion on operating margins around 60%. The company's market capitalization sits near $85 billion. Terry Duffy, who started as a runner on the exchange floor in 1980, has been chairman and CEO since 2020. He leads a company that, despite its dominant position, has faced scrutiny: a $5 million CFTC fine in 2024 for wheat market oversight failures, criticism over carbon offset futures integrity, and several Globex outages that disrupted trading. Still, CME continues to expand, launching Bitcoin Friday Futures in 2024 and partnering with Google Cloud in 2025 for AI-powered analytics.[edit]