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The New York Mercantile Exchange is quietly making preparations to begin ramping-down its Access electronic trading platform in an attempt to migrate all electronic trading of its products to its ClearPort platform. Even though plans are well underway to complete an entire migration expeditiously, no official date has been set or announced by the Nymex for the transfer. However, the exchange has notified regulators that it is targeting the third quarter of this year.
During 2004, roughly 8.2 million contracts were traded on Access, accounting for approximately 5% of the Nymex's total trading and clearing volume. Up until now, ClearPort has operated primarily as a system for processing off-exchange trades. In 2004, approximately 14.3 million off-exchange trades were cleared through the ClearPort system, up from 6 million in 2003 and only about a half-million in 2002.
The migration process of Access products to Clearport is to provide a one-stop trading shop for its customers, Nymex spokesperson Anu Ahluwalia said "ClearPort is overall a more flexible system, which will provide a more efficient and accessible trading platform to our current customers -- and its dynamic features will hopefully attract new customers as well."
As a first step to begin the migration process, the Nymex has recently announced that it will transition its e-miNY crude oil and...