The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)/New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) floor in New York City. CME Group is the world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange.
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Trading halted on Friday at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but trading has gradually resumed as cooling issues at one of its data centers affected traders around the world.
Stock futures and options trading fully resumed at 8:30 a.m. ET, with other services gradually being restored. Bonds and metals resumed trading after a pause, but individual stocks were still trading pre-market, according to FactSet data.
“All CME Group markets are open and trading,” a CME Group spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Earlier, CME Group representatives told CNBC that cooling issues at the CyrusOne data center are causing a market outage, adding that once the outage is resolved, it could take some time to see movement on affected contracts.
Globex’s futures and options market, the foreign exchange platform’s EBS market, and BMD market were all affected. The EBS market reopened at 7 a.m. ET, approximately 90 minutes after subsidiary BrokerTec EU Market resumed trading.
CME is the world’s largest exchange operator by market value, trading futures and options across a variety of asset classes, including agricultural products, energy, metals, and equities.
cooling problems
Earlier, a spokesperson for Dallas, Texas-based CyrusOne told CNBC that the company was actively addressing cooling system issues at its CHI1 data center facility in the Chicago area, impacting customers including CME Group.
“On November 27, our CHI1 facility experienced a cooling equipment failure that affected multiple cooling units,” they said in an email. “Our engineering team is working with specialist mechanical contractors to restore full cooling capacity on site. We have successfully restarted some chillers at limited capacity and have deployed temporary cooling equipment to supplement the permanent system.”
A CyrusOne representative said the company is in direct contact with all affected customers and that its teams are “working around the clock to restore normal operations as quickly and safely as possible.”
“We apologize for the disruption this issue has caused and appreciate our customers’ patience as we work towards a full resolution,” the company added.
Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, told CNBC that it was fortunate that the power outage occurred on one of the slowest trading days of the year in the U.S., right after Thanksgiving.
“It looks like we are gradually starting to resume some operations,” he said. “I was told this could have been much worse.”
Emir Shazwan, a futures trader at Ninefold Trading Ltd. based in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur, told CNBC on Friday that he was on the phone with his broker “all afternoon” local time as the CME outage dragged on.
Shazwan said trading in the Asian and European sessions would be more directly affected given the timing of the outage (weekend, just after a major U.S. holiday and early morning for U.S. traders).
He added that creating “permanent distortions” in the market will depend on how quickly the problem can be resolved.
“While inconvenient, it is not unprecedented. However, this type of event can significantly change market structure and price discovery,” he said. “Current price movements reflect that the market is already being affected. The market has been relatively flat and trading in a very narrow range since Wednesday, November 26th at approximately 10:00 pm ET, and we expect such trends and price fluctuations to continue until the issue is resolved.”
This is not the first time CME has had to suspend electronic trading. Back in 2014, technical issues halted some trading on CME’s Globex electronic system, impacting agricultural contracts.
Last year, trading in stocks, bonds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) was temporarily halted in Switzerland after the SIX stock exchange encountered problems with data distribution.
Shazwan’s own trades are not affected, he told CNBC.
“I took an early vacation at the beginning of the month because I expected the major markets, especially the US indexes, to be depressed until early next year,” he said.
—CNBC’s Lisa Kailai Han and Matt Ward-Perkins contributed to this article.
