NEW YORK: Just over a week ago, CME Group Inc suffered the worst ever trading outage on the world’s most important agricultural markets, plunging electronic screens into darkness and sending dozens of traders scrambling for Chicago’s famous but now often deserted trading “pits”.
It seemed like an impossible task: replace the seamless efficiency of an electronic trading screen with hand signals and guttural shouts to execute clients’ orders to trade corn, wheat or cattle during the “close”, often the busiest time of the day.