Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the context of "Chicago Board of Trade"

The TED spread is the difference between the interest rates on interbank loans and on short-term U.S. government debt ("T-bills"). TED is an acronym formed from T-Bill and ED, the ticker symbol for the Eurodollar futures contract.

Initially, the TED spread was the difference between the interest rates for three-month U.S. Treasuries contracts and the three-month Eurodollars contract as represented by the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). However, since the Chicago Mercantile Exchange dropped T-bill futures after the 1987 crash, the TED spread was calculated as the difference between the three-month LIBOR and the three-month T-bill interest rate. The discontinuation of LIBOR in 2021 led to its partial replacement by the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) in the calculation, which does not provide an equivalent measurement.

CME Group Inc. (formerly Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc.) is an American financial services company based in Chicago, Illinois. It operates financial derivatives exchanges, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), and the Commodity Exchange (COMEX). The company owns 27% of S&P Dow Jones Indices. It is the world's largest operator of financial derivatives exchanges. Its exchanges are platforms for trading in agricultural products, currencies, energy, interest rates, metals, futures contracts, options, stock indexes, and cryptocurrencies futures.

Headquartered in Chicago, the company maintains offices in New York, Houston, and Washington D.C., in the United States, as well as abroad in Bangalore, India, Beijing, China, Belfast, Ireland, Calgary, Canada, Hong Kong, London, England, Seoul, Korea, Singapore, and Tokyo, Japan.

In finance, margin is the collateral that a holder of a financial instrument has to deposit with a counterparty (most often a broker or an exchange) to cover some or all of the credit risk the holder poses for the counterparty. This risk can arise if the holder has done any of the following:

• Borrowed cash from the counterparty to buy financial instruments,
• Borrowed financial instruments to sell them short,
• Entered into a derivative contract.

The collateral for a margin account can be the cash deposited in the account or securities provided, and represents the funds available to the account holder for further share trading. On United States futures exchanges, margins were formerly called performance bonds. Most of the exchanges today use SPAN ("Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk") methodology, which was developed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1988, for calculating margins for options and futures.

Hand signaling, also known as arb or arbing (short for arbitrage), is a system of hand signals used on financial trading floors to communicate buy and sell information in an open outcry trading environment. The system is used at financial exchanges such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the American Stock Exchange (AMEX). The AMEX is the only US stock market to permit the transmission of buy and sell orders through hand signals as of 2003.

Traders usually flash the signals quickly across a room to make a sale or a purchase. Signals that occur with palms facing out and hands away from the body are an indication the gesturer wishes to sell. When traders face their palms in and hold their hands up, they are gesturing to buy.