I wasn’t sure if it was caused by massive interest in plummeting ag futures markets yesterday, but for some reason the new website for the Chicago Board of Trade wasn’t working yesterday.
Click – nothing. Click – nothing. What the frak is going on? Has trading been suspended? It drove me crazy, and I imagine it drove about 500,000 other commodity market watchers crazy too. The screen would freeze up. Various contracts I clicked on would bring up notes that the “data is not currently available.” The whole site seemed a mess.
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Worrisome drop in grain prices
Prices had been softening for most of the previous month, but heading into the Labour Day long weekend, the price drops were startling.
Today it’s clear that the problems were due to working-in problems with the new site – cmegroup.com – which is replacing cbot.com and cme.com. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange took over the CBOT last year and this is part of the merging of the ancient derivatives markets into one.Â
The new site, I believe, officially launched late Friday, but Monday was its first real test. Bad day to intro a new website. The USDA reports yesterday gave the crop markets a real kick in the nards, and prices plunged fast. People needed to know what was going on. They couldn’t really find out what was going on in Chicago from its own site. I was using the Wall Street Journal site to get Chicago numbers, and checking with the Minneapolis Grain Exchange and Kansas City Board of Trade sites to get other numbers. But this kind of a SNAFU isn’t a good thing for an organization like the CME/CBOT. Like all financial markets, the Chicago derivatives markets rely on the confidence of the users, and some might get a little antsy when they can’t even get a new website up and running right.
Today the CME has temporarily reopened the old CBOT and CME websites so that people can get market prices while the exchange works on fixing its embarrassing problem. And I imagine some website developer is hiding, or experiencing the same sort of pain that the ag markets felt yesterday.
(There’s better news today: both soybeans and wheat have retraced some of their big losses yesterday, but corn is still falling.)
