With construction beginning next week, exchange officials began to meet with members today to provide updates on the new trading floor facility that will be located in the historic Chicago Board of Trade building at 141 W. Jackson Blvd. Beginning in March the company's equity index products will migrate to the newly revised trading floor facility. Interest rates and foreign exchange products will follow in April, with commodities products migrating in May.

CME Group will continue to provide access to the widest array of benchmark products through two venues -- open outcry and electronic trading. The combined trading floor is designed to create new cross-product trading opportunities based on the adjacency of related markets -- a feature that is currently not available with trading floors in two separate locations. After an extensive evaluation, it was determined that open outcry of certain products with more than 90 percent of trading liquidity on the screen could be moved entirely electronic.

Today, CME Group trades approximately 11 million contracts each day with 2.38 million traded via open outcry.

As a result of the trading floor consolidation, CME Group will move the following products exclusively to electronic trading: 1-Month LIBOR futures, Euroyen futures and options on futures, Frozen Pork Bellies futures and options, Cash Dairy, South American Bean futures, 100-Ounce Gold options, 5,000-Ounce Silver options, and Ethanol futures.

In addition, trading of all FX products, including Australian Dollar, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen, Mexican Peso, New Zealand Dollar, and Swiss Franc futures on the floor will be consolidated into a single trading pit. CME Group will move trading of Brazilian Real, Czech Koruna, Hungarian Forint, Korean Won, Polish Zloty, Russian Rubble and South African Rand futures as well as Cross-Rates Futures contracts to an electronic platform.