CME Group interest rate products

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CME Group offers a listing of interest rate futures and options products, and its Eurodollar futures contract is one of the world's most actively traded futures offerings. In terms of broad institutional usage, the Eurodollar option stands at the top of the heap among options products.

CME Group interest rate products span the entire U.S. dollar-denominated yield curve since the merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which traditionally focused on shorter-dated terms, with the Chicago Board of Trade, which was most active at the longer end of the yield curve.

Short-, medium- and long-term interest rate risk can be managed with products based on Eurodollars, U.S. Treasuries, swaps, other dollar-related instruments, and products for managing interest rate risk in Europe and Asia.

CME Group interest rate futures products are traded electronically on the CME Globex platform. All trading pits were closed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. On August 10, 2020, the Eurodollar options pit was reopened for open outcry trade and it remained the only CME pit open as of February 2021.

CME Group interest rate futures and options products

CME-originated products

CME Group Eurodollars One-month SOFR Futures Three-month SOFR Futures CME Group Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index CME Group 2 Year USD Deliverable Interest Rate Swap CME Group 5 Year USD Deliverable Interest Rate Swap CME Group 10 Year USD Deliverable Interest Rate Swap CME Group 30 Year USD Deliverable Interest Rate Swap CME Group Euroyen CME Group Eurozone HICP CME Group Credit Index Events CME Group 2-Year Swap Rate CME Group CME 5-Year Swap Rate CME Group CME 10-Year Swap Rate CME Group 13-Week T-Bill CME Group JGB (Japanese government bonds) CME Group Swaps on Swapstream CME Group CME Cleared Interest Rate Swap

CBOT-originated products

CME Group U.S. Treasury Bond CME Group Ultra U.S. Treasury Bond CME Group Ultra U.S. Treasury Bond CME Group 2-Year U.S. Treasury notes CME Group 5-Year U.S. Treasury notes CME Group 10-Year U.S. Treasury notes CME Group 30-Day Federal Funds

Regulation and Clearing

CME Group is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. CME Group's interest rate product customers deal anonymously in a fully transparent market, where large and small customers have equal access to the same prices and same pool of liquidity. A central futures clearing mechanism, CME Clearing, settles all trades and acts as the counterparty between buyers and sellers, thus virtually guaranteeing the creditworthiness of every transaction.

History

With the merger of CME and the Chicago Board of Trade in July 2007, the merged exchange can claim introduction of the first interest rate futures product in the mid-1970s -- futures on GNMA (Government National Mortgage Association) instruments launched in October 1975 on the Chicago Board of Trade. Although this was the first interest rate futures contract, it no longer trades and has been delisted for some time. Just a few months after GNMA futures were launched, in early 1976 Chicago Mercantile Exchange answered with futures on 90-day Treasury bills, and in 1978, the CBOT introduced futures on 30-year Treasury bonds.

Eurodollar futures, the first cash-settled contract, which set the course for scores of other contracts to adopt cash settlement in future years, was introduced at CME in 1981. The contract called for settlement in cash, in effect a payment on the last trading day of the difference between a reputable, independent and widely accepted cash price and the futures price. The cash-settlement innovation safeguarded the futures contract's usefulness to hedgers and opened the way for new types of contracts on which a delivery option would be impossible or prohibitively expensive.

Again, generally, CME and CBOT concentrated their individual interest rate listings at different ends of the yield curve - CME offering products at the shorter end and CBOT at the longer-dated end.

New Products

• On Oct. 1, 2007, CME Group launched futures on the Lehman Brothers U.S. Aggregate Index, a benchmark debt index]] for U.S. investment grade fixed income securities.

• CME Group announced that in the first quarter of 2008, the launch of CME Swaps on Swapstream, the first OTC interest rate swap to offer the full benefits and financial safeguards of central counterparty clearing. CME Swaps on Swapstream will include forward-dated interest rate swaps denominated in U.S. dollars and in the euro and will be traded on the Swapstream sPro™ platform. (CME in July 2006 acquired London-based Swapstream, an interdealer electronic trading platform for interest rate swaps, for $15 million.)

• U.S. Treasury futures began trading on CME Globex in January 2008.

• In mid-June of 2009, CME Group announced the addition of options on 5-, 7-, 10- and 30-Year interest rate swap futures, beginning July 13, 2009.

• On January 11, 2010, CME Group launched trading in ultra-long interest-rate bonds. The new ultra bond futures require deliveries of maturities 25 years and longer, meaning that the new contract will more closely track the price of longer bonds.

Ultra 10-Year Note futures reached a record volume of 1.7 million contracts on February 23, 2021, surpassing the previous record of 1.5 million set on February 25, 2020, as U.S. Treasury yields climbed to levels not seen in a year A record 1.8 million 30-Year Bond futures contracts were also traded on February 23, 2021.

• On May 7, 2018, CME Group launched monthly and quarterly Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) futures on May 7, 2018. The futures are based on the Alternative Reference Rates Committee-endorsed SOFR index, published daily by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in cooperation with the U.S. Office of Financial Research.

Other CME Group Product Areas

• CME Group commodity products
• CME Group foreign currency products
• CME Group stock index products
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• CME Group real estate products
• CME Group metals products