Market Fairness Issue Requires Clear Response

For our modern marketplace to thrive, participants, operators, and regulators should meet standards of fairness and transparency to achieve trust. Trust is achieved when market participants have confidence that all available and relevant information about value is fairly reflected in the prices of financial instruments in a competitive marketplace.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), unfortunately, is falling short of this standard by structurally allowing for the early dissemination of material trade data to a select group of customers before that same information is provided to the general public via market data feeds. This practice runs counter to the goal of a fair and efficient marketplace and CME leadership, along with regulators at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Association (CFTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), should take steps to ensure the practice is discontinued.