CME Group


How do you get a weak signal from noisy data? That’s the question Blu Putnam, Managing Director and Chief Economist at exchange operator CME Group says will dominate the future of data analysis.

At a time when everyone is suffering from information overload, everyone also has a choice to make about how they handle and analyze the data they work with and often live by. While Putnam takes a ‘Bayesian’ approach (learn more about that here), others are trusting in everything from aggressive data mining to narrowing down data needs to suit desired outcomes (learn more about a wind energy startup based on that premise here). Keep reading →


The floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange in lower Manhattan is one of the rare places the complex interplay between the ‘real’ economy of infrastructure and goods and the financial economy of data sets and dizzying amounts of money can be seen in action.

In an increasingly computerized trading world, floor traders at Nymex, since 2008 part of the globe-spanning exchange powerhouse CME Group, are an increasingly rare breed involved in an increasingly unusual occupation. But for pure dramatic representation of the financial economy at work, nothing conveys the reach and reality of the trading universe like a busy pit moving contracts in real commodities. Keep reading →

What trading technology used to look like at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1986.

Energy trading has long been divided between the headline prices everyone can see on the news and the much longer list of prices that exist in the traditionally more freewheeling over the counter markets. Keep reading →


China’s growing thirst for oil will leave the rest of the world scrambling for supply, oil could soon face a competitor it never expected and the US has no free market for energy. These are just a few of the provocative ideas former Shell Oil President John Hofmeister shared at a recent New York Energy Forum meeting.

Upon retiring from Shell Oil – the US subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell – in 2008, Hofmeister founded the non-profit nationwide membership association Citizens for Affordable Energy. The group is dedicated to promoting sound US energy security solutions that include a range of affordable energy supplies, efficiency improvements, essential infrastructure, sustainable environmental policies and public energy issue education. Keep reading →


The upcoming World Energy Leadership Summit in Istanbul will be a good forum to “test the waters” on how global markets view competition in the energy sector, according to CME Group Chief Economist Blu Putnam.

Turkey is a good crossroads to discuss the future of cheaper, cleaner and more efficient energy development in the developing world even as growth challenges and policy limit the expansion of energy infrastructure in many developed countries, Putnam said in a recent interview with Breaking Energy. Keep reading →


Energy markets have transformed over the past decade in an accelerating process driven by a mix of deregulation, information technology and shifting fuel economics.

Managing the volatile risks that come with those changes has sparked a proliferation of hedging products and boosted volume on major exchanges that offer clarity and a degree of financial reassurance for energy companies traditionally reliant on lengthy bilateral contracts that leave them hugely exposed to suppliers and customers. With its purchase of the New York Mercantile Exchange in 2008, exchange operator CME Group became the leading venue for energy trading and placed itself squarely at the intersection of still-evolving trends in the sector. Keep reading →


Energy companies have largely had a “good” crisis.

As banks, manufacturing firms and more recently entire governments have faced defaults and even collapse, established players across the energy sector have shown their mettle and continued to rack up profits. Oil and gas firms benefited from entering 2008 with high oil prices that have only dipped intermittently since, while the power sector implemented crisis-management lessons learned ten years ago in the scorched-earth aftermath of Enron’s collapse. Keep reading →

Fuel For Growth — a discussion on energy policy with @GovRichardson http://ow.ly/79fgp CMEGroup

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