The New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) is a

commodity In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. The price of a co ...

futures exchange A futures exchange or futures market is a central financial exchange where people can trade standardized futures contracts defined by the exchange. Futures contracts are derivatives contracts to buy or sell specific quantities of a commodity or fi ...

owned and operated by

CME Group CME Group Inc. (Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, The Commodity Exchange) is an American global markets company. It is the world's largest financial derivatives exchange, and trades in asset clas ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

. NYMEX is located at

One North End Avenue One North End Avenue, also known as the New York Mercantile Exchange building, is an office building and the only non-tower financial building in Brookfield Place in Lower Manhattan, New York City. It is located on the coast of Battery Park City ...

in Brookfield Place in the

Battery Park City Battery Park City is a mainly residential planned community and neighborhood on the west side of the southern tip of the island of Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded by the Hudson River on the west, the Hudson River shoreline on the nort ...

section of

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five Boroughs of New York City, boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the List of co ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

. The company's two principal divisions are the New York Mercantile Exchange and Commodity Exchange, Inc (COMEX), once separately owned exchanges. NYMEX traces its history to 1882 and for most of its history, as was common of exchanges, it was owned by the members who traded there. Later, NYMEX Holdings, Inc., the former parent company of the New York Mercantile Exchange and COMEX, went public and became listed on the

New York Stock Exchange The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed ...

on November 17, 2006, under the ticker symbol NMX. On March 17, 2008, Chicago based

signed a definitive agreement to acquire NYMEX Holdings, Inc. for $11.2 billion in cash and stock and the takeover was completed in August 2008. Both NYMEX and COMEX now operate as designated contract markets (DCM) of the CME Group. The other two designated contract markets in the CME Group are the

Chicago Mercantile Exchange The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) (often called "the Chicago Merc", or "the Merc") is a global derivatives marketplace based in Chicago and located at 20 S. Wacker Drive. The CME was founded in 1898 as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, a ...

and the

Chicago Board of Trade The Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), established on April 3, 1848, is one of the world's oldest futures exchange, futures and options exchanges. On July 12, 2007, the CBOT merged with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to form CME Group. CBOT and ...

. The New York Mercantile Exchange handles billions of dollars' worth of oil transactions,

energy carrier An energy carrier is a substance (fuel) or sometimes a phenomenon (energy system) that contains energy that can be later converted to other forms such as mechanical work or heat or to operate chemical or physical processes. Such carriers inclu ...

metals A metal (from Greek μέταλλον ''métallon'', "mine, quarry, metal") is a material that, when freshly prepared, polished, or fractured, shows a lustrous appearance, and conducts electricity and heat relatively well. Metals are typicall ...

, and other commodities being bought and sold on the trading floor and the overnight electronic trading computer systems for future delivery. The prices quoted for transactions on the exchange are the basis for prices that people pay for various commodities throughout the world. The floor of the NYMEX is regulated by the

Commodity Futures Trading Commission The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is an independent agency of the US government created in 1974 that regulates the U.S. derivatives markets, which includes futures, swaps, and certain kinds of options. The Commodity Exchange Act ...

, an independent agency of the United States government. Each individual company that trades on the exchange must send its own independent brokers. Therefore, a few employees on the floor of the exchange represent a big

corporation A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and ...

and the exchange employees only record the transactions and have nothing to do with the actual trade. Although mostly electronic since 2006, the NYMEX maintained a small venue, or "pit", that still practiced the

open outcry Open outcry is a method of communication between professionals on a stock exchange or futures exchange, typically on a trading floor. It involves shouting and the use of hand signals to transfer information primarily about buy and sell orde ...

trading system, in which traders employed shouting and complex hand gestures on the physical trading floor. A project to preserve the hand signals used at NYMEX has been published. NYMEX closed the pit permanently at the end of trading Friday, December 30, 2016, because of shrinking volume.

Early history

Commodity exchanges began in the middle of the 19th century, when businessmen began organizing market forums to make buying and selling of commodities easier. These marketplaces provided a place for buyers and sellers to set the quality, standards, and establish rules of business. By the late 19th century there were about 1,600 marketplaces at

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as ...

s and

railroad stations A train station, railway station, railroad station or depot is a railway facility where trains stop to load or unload passengers, freight or both. It generally consists of at least one platform, one track and a station building providing such ...

. In 1872, a group of Manhattan

dairy A dairy is a business enterprise established for the harvesting or processing (or both) of animal milk – mostly from cows or buffaloes, but also from goats, sheep, horses, or camels – for human consumption. A dairy is typically located on ...

merchants got together and created the

Butter Butter is a dairy product made from the fat and protein components of churned cream. It is a semi-solid emulsion at room temperature, consisting of approximately 80% butterfat. It is used at room temperature as a spread (food), spread, melted a ...

and

Cheese Cheese is a dairy product produced in wide ranges of flavors, textures, and forms by coagulation of the milk protein casein. It comprises proteins and fat from milk, usually the milk of cows, buffalo, goats, or sheep. During product ...

Exchange of New York. They were trying to bring order and standardization to the chaotic conditions that existed in their industry. Soon,

egg An egg is an organic vessel grown by an animal to carry a possibly fertilized egg cell (a zygote) and to incubate from it an embryo within the egg until the embryo has become an animal fetus that can survive on its own, at which point the a ...

trade became part of the business conducted on the exchange and the name was modified to the Butter, Cheese, and Egg Exchange. In 1882, the name finally changed to the New York Mercantile Exchange when opening trade to dried

fruit In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants that is formed from the ovary after flowering. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants (also known as angiosperms) disseminate their seeds. Edible fruits in partic ...

s, canned goods, and

poultry Poultry () are domesticated birds kept by humans for their eggs, their meat or their feathers. These birds are most typically members of the superorder Galloanserae (fowl), especially the order Galliformes (which includes chickens, quail ...

. As centralized warehouses were built into principal market centers such as New York and

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

in the early 20th century, exchanges in smaller cities began to disappear giving more business to the exchanges such as the NYMEX in bigger cities. In 1933, the COMEX was established through the merger of four smaller exchanges; the National Metal Exchange, the Rubber Exchange of New York, the National Raw Silk Exchange, and the New York Hide Exchange. Through the 1970s, 80's and 90's COMEX, NYMEX, and other exchanges shared a single trading floorGoodman in

4 World Trade Center 4 World Trade Center (4 WTC; also known as 150 Greenwich Street) is a skyscraper constructed as part of the new World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The tower is located on Greenwich Street at the southeastern corner of the ...

Goods

For years, the NYMEX traders had done a large business trading futures of

Maine Maine () is a U.S. state, state in the New England and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Provinces and territories of Canad ...

potato The potato is a starchy food, a tuber of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'' and is a root vegetable native to the Americas. The plant is a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae. Wild potato species can be found from the southern Un ...

crop. According to Leah McGrath Goodman's 2011 book ''The Asylum'', manipulation in this market was commonplace, performed by various parties including potato inspectors and NYMEX traders. The worst incident was the 1970s potato bust, when

Idaho Idaho ( ) is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and W ...

potato magnate J. R. Simplot allegedly went short in huge numbers, leaving a large amount of contracts unsettled at the expiration date, resulting in a large number of defaulted delivery contracts. A public outcry followed, and the newly created

held hearings. NYMEX was barred not only from continuing to trade in potatoes futures, but from entering any new area in which it hadn't traded before. NYMEX's reputation was severely damaged, because, as future chairman Michel Marks told Goodman in his book, "The essence of an exchange is the sanctity of its contract." When the potato ban came into effect, NYMEX's platinum, palladium and heating oil markets were not significantly affected. However, NYMEX's reputation suffered in Washington, D.C., especially with the regulations in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the president of the exchange, Richard Leone brought in John Elting Treat, White House energy adviser to Presidents Carter and Reagan to help restore the credibility of NYMEX and to help the exchange explore the possibility of entering the petroleum market recognizing the great potential for moving well beyond the limited size of the New York Heating Oil market. When Leone left NYMEX in 1981 as a result of a strong disagreement with the NYMEX board, John Elting Treat was asked to replace him as president. The launching of the WTI crude oil contract was championed by Treat, who, with difficulty, convinced the board and the two Marks family members, veteran and highly respected floor trader Francis Marks and his son, Michael, who had just become chairman of the board, to take a chance on trading crude oil. Arnold Safir was one of the members of an advisory committee formed by Treat to help design the new contract. Treat, with Board Chairman Marks and the support of the rest of the NYMEX board, eventually chose West Texas Intermediate (WTI) as the traded product and Cushing, Oklahoma, as the delivery point. Robin Woodhead, who later became the first chairman of the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) in London started an active dialogue with Treat about whether they could start a Brent Crude oil contracts. Treat was very supportive and gave Woodhead strong support and a lot of advice. Shortly thereafter, after substantial conversations, The IPE was formally launched and started trading Brent. Treat and his research staff then began looking for other oil products to trade. Gasoline was clearly next on the product list but there was a lot of debate about where the delivery point should be. The Gulf Coast was the easiest, but the exchange also looked at California markets, but decided they wouldn't work. Treat then started looking simultaneously at launching crude and later products options contracts. He found that the existing NYMEX floor traders didn't have the mathematical skills necessary to trade options, so the exchange offered financial inducements to get members of the American Stock Exchange's options traders to come over and trade options on petroleum futures. Under Treat's leadership, NYMEX also began to research the potential for trading natural gas and electricity, but focused first on natural gas. Product quality of natural gas was not an issue in that market, but the delivery point was a more difficult choice. After launching the original crude oil futures contract, Treat began an aggressive marketing campaign to first bring in the large US and British oil companies and then moved on to pull in the large Middle East producers. It took almost a year to get the first US "majors" to start trading, but several "majors" did not start for almost 5 years. The initial resistance from the OPEC producers was almost impossible to break through, although some finally gave in, among the first being Venezuela. The rumors on the floor at that time were the Arab producers would trade gold futures as a proxy for oil prices (since the Arabs were major purchasers of gold and would buy more when their pockets were filled by rising oil prices, and conversely sell when oil revenues fell and reduced their ability to buy gold). After the potato ban, NYMEX's existence was in doubt. Most of the trading volume had been in potatoes. Without a good commodity, the traders had trouble making money. Eventually, the new chairman, Michel Marks – the son of commodities icon Francis Q. Marks – along with economist Arnold Safer, figured out that NYMEX could revamp an old

heating oil Heating oil is any petroleum product or other oil used for heating; a fuel oil. Most commonly, it refers to low viscosity grades of fuel oil used for furnaces or boilers use for home heating and in other buildings. Home heating oil is often ...

futures contract. When the government deregulated heating oil, the contract had a chance of becoming a good object of trade on the floor. A new

futures contract In finance, a futures contract (sometimes called a futures) is a standardized legal contract to buy or sell something at a predetermined price for delivery at a specified time in the future, between parties not yet known to each other. The asset ...

was carefully drawn up and trading began on a tiny scale in 1978. Some of the first users of NYMEX heating oil deliveries were small scale suppliers of people in the Northern United States. NYMEX's business threatened some entrenched interests like

big oil Big Oil is a name used to describe the world's six or seven largest publicly traded and investor-owned oil and gas companies, also known as supermajors. The term, particularly in the United States, emphasizes their economic power and influenc ...

and government groups like

OPEC The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC, ) is a cartel of countries. Founded on 14 September 1960 in Baghdad by the first five members (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela), it has, since 1965, been headquart ...

that had traditionally controlled oil prices. NYMEX provided an "open market" and thus transparent pricing for heating oil, and, eventually, crude oil, gasoline, and natural gas. NYMEX's oil

s were standardized for the delivery of

West Texas Intermediate West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is a grade or mix of crude oil; the term is also used to refer to the spot price, the futures price, or assessed price for that oil. In colloquial usage, WTI usually refers to the WTI Crude Oil futures contract ...

light, sweet crude oil to Cushing.

Growth

The energy trading business took off, and NYMEX boomed. The

floor became a cacophony of shouting traders and pit cards. The pits became a place where many people without much education or ability to fit into Wall Street could have a chance at being rich. Goodman's book tells the stories of many of the personalities that built the exchange in this era. COMEX (Commodity Exchange, Inc), one of the exchanges that shared 4 World Trade Center with NYMEX, had traditionally looked down on NYMEX for being smaller and for having the toxic reputation from the potato bust. With NYMEX's energy trading boom, it became much larger and wealtheir than COMEX. On August 3, 1994, the NYMEX and COMEX finally merged under the NYMEX name. By the late 1990s, there were more people working on the NYMEX floor than there was space for them. In 1997, the NYMEX moved to a new building on the Southwestern portion of

, part of a complex called the

World Financial Center World Financial Center may refer to: China * Chongqing World Financial Center * Shanghai World Financial Center * Tianjin World Financial Center United States * Brookfield Place (New York City), formerly the World Financial Center complex ** 2 ...

Later history

September 11, 2001 attacks

The NYBOT's original headquarters and trading floor were destroyed in the

September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commerci ...

on the World Trade Center. Several NYMEX people were lost in the tragedy, even though the new NYMEX building itself was mostly undamaged. Despite the area's devastation, the exchange's management and staff quickly had the exchange working. The WTC/WFC art gallery, long located in the Nymex building, continued showing world and community art until 2012. The last-ever exhibit there was a solo show by

actualist In analytic philosophy, actualism is the view that everything there ''is'' (i.e., everything that has ''being'', in the broadest sense) is actual. Another phrasing of the thesis is that the domain of unrestricted quantification ranges over all ...

painter Terry Ward. On February 26, 2003, the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) signed a lease agreement with the NYMEX to move into its World Financial Center headquarters and trading facility. NYMEX maintained a close relationship with many organizations and people at World Trade Center, and After the attacks, the NYMEX built a $12 million trading floor backup facility outside of New York City with 700 traders' booths, 2,000

telephone A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into el ...

s, and a backup computer system. This backup was in case of another terrorist attack or natural disaster in Lower

Electronic trading

NYMEX held a virtual monopoly on "open market" oil futures trading (as opposed to the "dark market" or over-the-counter market. However, in the early 2000s the electronically based exchanges started taking away the business of the

markets like NYMEX.

Enron Enron Corporation was an American energy, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was founded by Kenneth Lay in 1985 as a merger between Lay's Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, both relatively small regional compani ...

's online energy trading system was part of this trend. Jeff Sprecher's Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, was another example. ICE eventually began trading oil contracts that were extremely similar to NYMEX's, taking away market share almost immediately.Goodman The open outcry NYMEX pit traders had always been against electronic trading because it threatened their income and their lifestyle. The executives at NYMEX felt that electronic trading was the only way to keep the exchange competitive. NYMEX teamed up with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to use Globex in 2006. The trading pits emptied out as many traders quit. Banks, hedge funds, and huge oil companies stopped making telephone calls to the pits and started trading directly for themselves over screens. In this period the NYMEX also worked on founding the Dubai Mercantile Exchange in the

United Arab Emirates The United Arab Emirates (UAE; ar, اَلْإِمَارَات الْعَرَبِيَة الْمُتَحِدَة ), or simply the Emirates ( ar, الِْإمَارَات ), is a country in Western Asia ( The Middle East). It is located at ...

. This was chronicled by Ben Mezrich in his

New York Times Best Selling ''The New York Times'' Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of bestseller, best-selling books in the United States.John Bear (educator), John Bear, ''The #1 New York Times Best Seller: intriguing facts about the 484 books ...

book '' Rigged'' which has been optioned for film adaptation by

Summit Entertainment Summit Entertainment is an American film production and distribution company. It is a label of Lionsgate Films, owned by Lionsgate Entertainment and is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. History Independent era (1991–2012) Summ ...

Sell-off

The final executive management of NYMEX decided to sell it off in pieces, take golden parachute buyouts, and leave. In 2006 NYMEX underwent an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

(IPO) and was listed on the

. The executives and exchange members owning seats on the exchange saw their net worth increase by millions of dollars in a few hours - many of the pit traders, who leased their seats instead of owning, did not. Other parts of NYMEX were sold to

private equity In the field of finance, the term private equity (PE) refers to investment funds, usually limited partnerships (LP), which buy and restructure financially weak companies that produce goods and provide services. A private-equity fund is both a typ ...

investors and the

. The CME got ownership of the physical facilities and began scrubbing the NYMEX logo and name off of various artifacts and closed the NYMEX museum. NYMEX eventually became little more than a brand name used by CME. By 2011, NYMEX

trading was relegated for the most part to a small number of people trading

options Option or Options may refer to: Computing *Option key, a key on Apple computer keyboards *Option type, a polymorphic data type in programming languages * Command-line option, an optional parameter to a command *OPTIONS, an HTTP request method ...

. In 2009 it was reported that holders of COMEX

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile ...

s experienced problems taking delivery of their metal. Along with chronic delivery delays, some investors received delivery of bars not matching their contract in serial number and weight. The delays could not be easily explained by slow warehouse movements, as the daily reports of these movements showed little activity. Because of these problems, there were concerns that COMEX did not have the gold inventory to back its existing warehouse receipts.

Trading platforms

*Pit (

) * Electronic trading ( Globex)

Commodities traded

;NYMEX DivisionList of Commodity Delivery Dates on Wikinvest *

Coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as stratum, rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen ...

* Crude oil *

Electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as describ ...

Gasoline Gasoline (; ) or petrol (; ) (see ) is a transparent, petroleum-derived flammable liquid that is used primarily as a fuel in most spark-ignited internal combustion engines (also known as petrol engines). It consists mostly of organic ...

Heating oil Heating oil is any petroleum product or other oil used for heating; a fuel oil. Most commonly, it refers to low viscosity grades of fuel oil used for furnaces or boilers use for home heating and in other buildings. Home heating oil is often ...

Natural gas Natural gas (also called fossil gas or simply gas) is a naturally occurring mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons consisting primarily of methane in addition to various smaller amounts of other higher alkanes. Low levels of trace gases like carbon ...

Palladium Palladium is a chemical element with the symbol Pd and atomic number 46. It is a rare and lustrous silvery-white metal discovered in 1803 by the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston. He named it after the asteroid Pallas, which was itself nam ...

Platinum Platinum is a chemical element with the symbol Pt and atomic number 78. It is a dense, malleable, ductile, highly unreactive, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Its name originates from Spanish , a diminutive of "silver". Pla ...

Propane Propane () is a three-carbon alkane with the molecular formula . It is a gas at standard temperature and pressure, but compressible to a transportable liquid. A by-product of natural gas processing and petroleum refining, it is commonly used as ...

Uranium Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weakly ...

;COMEX Division *

Aluminum Aluminium (aluminum in American and Canadian English) is a chemical element with the symbol Al and atomic number 13. Aluminium has a density lower than those of other common metals, at approximately one third that of steel. It h ...

Copper Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish ...

Gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile ...

Silver Silver is a chemical element with the Symbol (chemistry), symbol Ag (from the Latin ', derived from the Proto-Indo-European wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h₂erǵ-, ''h₂erǵ'': "shiny" or "white") and atomic number 47. A soft, whi ...

References

Notes Bibliography *

External links

* (NYMEX) * (COMEX)
TradingPitHistory.com
a website to preserve the hand signal language of open outcry trading * {{Authority control Commodity exchanges in the United States Companies based in New York City Financial services companies established in 1882 1882 establishments in New York (state) Futures exchanges Battery Park City CME Group