Beginning Monday, September 10, the weekly options on the following currencies, all trading against the U.S. dollar, will be available virtually 24 hours a day on the CME Globex electronic trading platform: Euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar and Australian dollar.

"The tremendous growth we have seen this year in CME Group's FX options volume reflects the market's interest in an effective and efficient electronic execution platform for FX options," said Derek Sammann, Managing Director, CME Group FX Products. "We see increasing demand from our global customer base to provide further trading efficiencies in these products so we will continue to serve the global FX market by expanding electronic access to our markets, adding new options trading functionality and developing innovative new products. The result of these efforts is that last month 49 percent of our FX options traded electronically compared to 12 percent in August 2006. In addition, electronic volume increased six-fold from August 2006 and total options volume was up 102 percent."

For the American-style FX options with quarterly expiration, the exchange plans to initiate electronic trading of the third and fourth quarterly options contracts at the end of September. In addition, Horizontal and Risk Reversal option strategies for the most actively-traded American-style FX options will be launched on CME Globex. CME Group first expanded electronic trading of American-style FX options when it initiated side-by-side trading of these contracts in December 2006.