CME Group buys Nymex and offloads metals

Exchange consolidation continued over the weekend, with CME Group buying Nymex, the New York-based metals and energy exchange, and selling its own metals business to the NYSE Euronext group.

CME Group will pay $3.4 billion in cash and around $5.2 billion in shares for Nymex, and has also offered to buy out 816 Nymex members for up to another $500 million. Nymex products have been available on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's (CME) Globex platform since 2006.

The deal is effectively unchanged from the initial terms announced on January 28.

Meanwhile, CME Group has sold off its own precious metals business, which it inherited from the takeover of the Chicago Board of Trade last year, to NYSE Euronext. The deal (on undisclosed terms) resolves a problem the CME Group had been wrestling with - the competition between Nymex's metals contracts on Globex and the CME's own metals contracts on the eCBOT platform - and clears the way for the integration of Nymex's Comex metals business.

The metals business includes futures and options on gold and silver - they will continue to be cleared by the CME for up to a year while NYSE Euronext develops its own clearing service, and will be traded on the Liffe Connect platform later this year.

See also: CME faces competition questions from DOJ 
CME in Nymex merger discussions
 Donohue: further exchange consolidation ahead 
Nymex launches electronically traded options on energy and base metal contracts
Derivatives Exchange of the year - Chicago Mercantile Exchange