Infinium Capital Management

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Infinium Capital Management

Founded	2001
Headquarters	Chicago, IL
Key People	Chairman George Hanley,CEO Charles Whitman
Products	trading, market-making and arbitrage in global derivatives and equiities
Web site	http://www.infiniumcm.com/

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Chicago-based Infinium Capital Management (ICM) trades mostly derivatives across a wide range of asset classes on US and foreign exchanges. The firm is well known as a market maker on several domestic commodity and financial markets including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGEX).

Brief Background

ICM was founded in 2001^[1] by a group of traders with experience in five global markets. The firm trades in equities, fixed income, commodity, currency and forex markets in the US, Europe and the Middle East. Besides the CME and MGEX, IFC is also a member of the Chicago Board of Trade, Kansas City Board of Trade and New York Board of Trade as well as the Commodity and Metals Exchange (COMEX), the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) and the Dubai Gold & Commodities Exchange.^[2]

Market Making

IFC is well known to US traders and investors as the first market maker for the CME's popular e-mini S&P Index Options earlier this decade. More recently, the MGEX credited IFC's market-making with allowing the exchange to expand one of its key grain contracts, the Hard Red Spring Wheat (HRSW) option, to around-the clock electronic trading on the CME's Globex platform.^[3]

Key People

Infinium's Chairman and co-founder, George Hanley (left), is also president of trading firm the Hanley Group, which spawned both Blink and IFC.^[4] Hanley began his trading-markets career as a runner at the CBOT in 1977 and launched the Hanley Group in 1986, which focused on combining disciplined trading strategies with emerging technologies. Hanley earned a bachelor's degree in management from the University of Dayton (OH).

IFC co-founder and chief executive officer Charles Whitman is considered an important authority on options trading and money management and helped start IFC to leverage the trading advantages of electronic platforms. Whitman began working full-time as a market trader at age 17 and became a member of the CBOT in 1992.^[5] He was already a partner in Blink Trading, LLC - which he sold a year later to GETCO - when he helped start IFC in September 2001. Whitman is a graduate of DePaul University in Chicago, majoring in finance.

Latest News

IFC was one of the first traders to join the CME's new OTC swaps-focused electronic-trading platform, CME Swaps on Swapstream, announced in early 2008.^[6] The new platform is anonymous and buy-side focused, which is asset managers hope will encourage more price-competition among dealers. Some 33 OTC traders and market-makers announced their participation in Swapstream, which CME acquired in 2006.