History
Currency futures were first created in 1970 at the International Commercial Exchange in New York. But the contracts did not "take off" due to the fact that the Bretton Woods system was still in effect. They did so a full two years before the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) in 1972, less than one year after the system of fixed exchange rates was abandoned along with the gold standard. Some commodity traders at the CME did not have access to the inter-bank exchange markets in the early 1970s, when they believed that significant changes were about to take place in the currency market. The CME actually now gives credit to the International Commercial Exchange (not to be confused with the ICE for creating the currency contract, and state that they came up with the idea independently of the International Commercial Exchange). The CME established the International Monetary Market (IMM) and launched trading in seven currency futures on May 16, 1972. Today, the IMM is a division of CME. In the fourth quarter of 2009, CME Group FX volume averaged 754,000 contracts per day, reflecting average daily notional value of approximately $100 billion. Currently most of these are traded electronically.
Other futures exchanges that trade currency futures are Euronext.liffe, Tokyo Financial Exchange and IntercontinentalExchange .
Read more about this topic: Currency Future
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