20 години печелим заедно
The Chicago Board of Trade, organized by 82 Chicago merchants as a grain cash market in 1848, is the oldest organized futures exchange.
Although experts may argue about the exact birth date of futures trading, the CBOT was already very active during the Civil War—even financing Union regiments—and trading “to-arrive” or forward contracts in agricultural commodities including wheat, corn and oats.
The official birth date of the CBOT may be 1859, when the market was granted a charter by the Illinois legislature to standardize grades of grain traded on the exchange. Futures contracts made their official debut in 1865 when the CBOT introduced standards for margin and delivery.
While the stock market crashed in 1873, futures trading continued to boom, which led to a series of innovations at the CBOT, such as publishing futures prices starting in 1877 and setting up the first clearing organization in 1883.
When the CBOE erected new headquarters to accommodate its expansion in 1885, the building was the first to use electrical lighting. By 1922, the growth in commodity futures trading was such that the U.S. government felt the need to create a regulator, the Grain Futures Administration.
Major CBOT innovations included the creation of a separate exchange to trade options, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), in 1973, and diversification into non-commodities contracts: futures on mortgaged-backed securities in 1975 and on U.S. Treasuries in 1977, while options on futures were created in 1982.
The CBOT celebrated its 150th anniversary with the launch of side-by-side trading of open-outcry and electronic trading on its Project A platform in 1998, paving the way for a move toward electronic trading for financial products.
In 2000, the CBOT is incorporated as a not-for-profit non-stock corporation and launches a new trading platform, a/c/e, in a partnership with German derivatives giant Eurex. This will help the exchange further diversify its lines of products, including mini-Dow futures and interest rate swaps and swap options.
Three years later, the CBOT announced it was switching to a new platform, Euronext’s Liffe Connect, which marked the end of its partnership with Eurex. In 2004, the exchange partnered with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange which agreed to clear all CBOT products on a new CME/CBOT Common Clearing Link.
The CBOT is a leading market for contracts based on four groups of products: agricultural commodities; interest rates, including Treasuries and German debt; the Dow Jones Industrial Average index; and gold and silver.