The country’s biggest exchange operator experienced a significant technical disruption Wednesday, forcing CME Group to temporarily suspend trading activities across its metals and natural gas markets.
The Chicago-based company announced that its CME Globex platform for metals and natural gas futures and options had to be shut down while technical teams worked to address the problems.
CME Group later provided an update, announcing that natural gas futures and options trading would resume with a pre-opening session at 12:45 Central Time, followed by full market opening at 12:50 Central Time.
Company officials confirmed that their technical support teams were actively working to investigate and resolve the underlying issues causing the disruption.
As a result of the technical problems, the exchange announced that all daily orders and good-till-date orders scheduled for Wednesday would be automatically canceled. However, good-till-canceled orders that had previously been processed and confirmed would continue to remain active in the system.
The difference between these order types is significant for traders: good-till-date orders only remain active until their specified expiration date, while good-till-canceled orders stay in the trading system until traders manually remove them.
CME Group holds the distinction of being the world’s most valuable exchange operator by market capitalization, offering trading services across a diverse portfolio that includes interest rates, stock indices, precious metals, energy commodities, digital currencies, and agricultural products.
This technical disruption follows another recent issue earlier in February, when the exchange experienced problems with publishing final settlement prices for metals trading.
