CME

The CME, short for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, is one of the largest derivatives exchanges in the world, providing the marketplace and clearing infrastructure where futures and options on futures change hands. It lists contracts across a wide range of asset classes, including stock indexes, interest rates, currencies, energy, metals, and agricultural commodities, and its benchmark products, such as futures on major stock indexes, are among the most actively traded derivatives anywhere.

CME Group is the parent company that today also owns other exchanges that were once separate, including the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Mercantile Exchange, having consolidated much of the US futures trading landscape under one umbrella over the past two decades. Beyond just matching buyers and sellers, CME operates a clearinghouse that stands between every trade, guaranteeing performance on both sides of a contract and setting the margin requirements that traders must post to hold a position.

For an investor, the CME matters less as a company to analyze and more as the venue where price discovery happens for many of the futures contracts referenced elsewhere in markets, from the price of oil to the implied path of interest rates. When a report references futures pricing or open interest, it is very often describing activity that took place on CME markets.