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CME said that all its markets were opened and trading, hours after the world’s largest exchange operator flagged the issue.
The outage was first posted on its website at 9:40 p.m. ET on Thursday and CME said it was due to a cooling issue at its CyrusOne data centers.
CME’s stock futures offerings linked to the S&P 500 , the Nasdaq 100 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are typically heavily traded before U.S. markets open, with investors relying on them to gauge trends and directions.
“We’re kind of lucky today. It was such a low volume day, but it could have had a much bigger effect,” Joe Saluzzi, partner, co-founder and head of equity market structure research and co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading.
“It does point to the risk of these failures and the connectedness to the markets that could cause bigger problems.”
Market volumes are expected to be light following the Thanksgiving holiday. Markets will close at 1 p.m. ET.
RETAILERS IN FOCUS AS HOLIDAY SHOPPING KICKS OFF
This week also kicked off the holiday shopping season, starting with Thanksgiving on Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday – crucial days of sales for big-box retailers.
Online sales on Thursday alone are expected to rise 6% from last year’s level to reach $8.6 billion, data from Salesforce showed, as retailers offer steep discounts to lure shoppers amid tariff woes and a slew of corporate layoffs.
Wall Street was also heading into the last trading session of the month, which was marked by worries about an AI bubble as valuations get stretched and tech behemoths spend billions to scale up infrastructure.
DECEMBER FED RATE CUT BETS RISE
Traders also struggled to gauge the Federal Reserve’s next monetary policy move as they took stock of a barrage of delayed government data and mixed views by policymakers on interest rates.
However, dovish remarks in recent weeks from some influential Fed officials doubled the bets of a 25-basis-point rate cut in December to 84.7%, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch Tool.
The S&P 500 was poised for its steepest monthly decline since April and the Nasdaq was set for its biggest since March. The Dow, however, was set for modest monthly gains.
Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a 1.91-to-1 ratio on the NYSE, and by a 1.59-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.
The S&P 500 posted 10 new 52-week highs and no new lows, while the Nasdaq Composite recorded 39 new highs and 15 new lows.
Reporting by Johann M Cherian, Shashwat Chauhan, Purvi Agarwal and Pranav Kashyap in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Maju Samuel
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
