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CME Group halted trading on its flagship metals market for an hour and a half on Wednesday, in the latest outage for the world’s biggest derivatives exchange.
The Chicago-based exchanges operator resumed trading in its Globex metals market, home to the main US gold futures contract, at about 1.45pm local time after it was stopped at 12.15pm. Its natural gas futures and options markets also endured trading stoppages of around 35 minutes.
CME Group has in recent years suffered several outages that have hampered investors’ ability to trade.
Last November, CME had an almost 10-hour outage in equities, bonds, currencies and commodities. It blamed the problem on a “cooling issue” at a data centre near its headquarters in Chicago.
CME said the incident on Wednesday was due to “technical” issues.
The hiccup comes during a turbulent period in global markets.
Gold and silver prices soared to record highs earlier this year as traders sought shelter from geopolitical strife and pullbacks in AI stocks that had surged in recent years.
But precious metals prices have remained highly volatile and are now trading below their recent peaks.
Meanwhile, severe winter weather as well as wider geopolitical uncertainty has sent natural gas prices soaring this year.
CME, founded in 1898, is the largest venue for investors to bet on commodities derivatives. In April last year, it set a monthly record of 35.9mn contracts for average daily volume.
CME recently announced plans to launch regulated cryptocurrency futures and options available to trade around the clock starting in May, pending a regulatory review.
