This week CME announced that it will close most of its futures trading pits in Chicago and New York City by July 2, 2015 as electronic trading has become the dominant way futures contracts are bought and sold.
CME Group is continuing open outcry in options on futures, in which pit-style trading still survives because computer technology has not yet fully addressed the complexity of futures-options.
However, the shift to fully electronic trading for all products is on the horizon.
Of these closures, CNBC’s Rick Santelli said, “If you didn’t see this coming, you weren’t paying attention.”
I’m happy to say that we’ve been finely attuned to the evolution taking place all along.
In 2001 my team and I foresaw this. We envisioned the end of open outcry as an inevitability, so much so that we named our online futures brokerage Open E Cry, pointing to the idea that all futures trading would happen electronically.
Sometimes we're early with ideas.
And once again my team and I have a clear vision of where the futures market is headed, with disruptive ideas that will manifest in our new company, Tradovate, in 2015.
In the coverage of CME’s announcement, CNBC anchor Jackie DeAngelis touched upon the question we’re most interested in answering: “Is it going to make it hard for the retail investor to get into this market?”
With Tradovate, we'll innovate the entire user experience for online retail futures trading.
We will do this by simplifying and streamlining the futures trading experience, and addressing cost structure to open doors for both active and new retail traders.
We will disrupt the current futures trading status quo by reshaping the user experience with next generation technology rooted in transparency and accessibility.
While we can’t go into detail just yet, our innovation is on schedule to be revealed in 2015.
If you'd like to be the first to receive details when we make our announcement, sign up here, subscribe to this blog, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.
-- Rick Tomsic, CEO of Tradovate and former CEO of Open E Cry
