Aaron, fwiw "On Sunday, January 13th, CBOT Agricultural commodity products and CBOT Dow Equity products will start trading on CME Globex". IB still shows ecbot though
WWIW my guess is that some of the T1 data lines into the CME failed, and consequently many market participants lost access . This event looked to me as if GLOBEX was still up and running but the order flow was partially (mostly) disrupted. I'm actually encouraged by the fact that you could still trade through IB, even though intermittently, i.e. every 5 secs or so. The last time something similar happened was in 2003, when GLOBEX was down for half a day, and even though trading went on in the Chicago pits, it was very slow and as if the NYSE/Nasdaq markets had just died or gone to sleep. It goes to show how enormously influential the future markets are to the functioning of the underlying market. To be fair to the CME, GLOBEX has always performed flawlessly even in the face of huge volumes, just think of the big selloffs back in Feb-Mar and Jul-Aug. On the record volume day that the DJIA plummeted suddenly 200+ points to a daily drop of -500+ due to recording problems at the NYSE, GLOBEX always performed flawlessly, no matter the volume of ESs that got thrown at it.
This time was definitely better than that one in 2003. I was short that time and couldn't get out. It cost me pretty good. By the way, I don't recall the market very quiet. The boyz in the pit started buying and a pretty good rally ensued. Like I say, I lost a decent amount of money on that deal. OldTrader
YM trades on Globex, but is shown as eCBOT because the CME Group still has separate data feed charges for Globex and eCBOT. They need to maintain their profit margins on the data feeds.
You're right the SPX went up about 10-15 handles in the pits, although it was over a period of 4 hours, and with no intraday swings, i.e almost in a straight line, and so did the cash market. What I meant to say was that the intraday volatility was suddenly gone, and both the cash and futures moved up steadily with no swings. Couldn't you hedge your position with YM. At that time YM was far less liquid than it is now, but at least ecbot (ACE) was up and running that day.
yeah, I could have hedged with YM. Unfortunately, it wasn't something I thought about. At first I thought it would be back up. Later I did hedge with SPY, but it was after some of that move had already taken place. OldTrader