Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you sir. (Operator instructions). Our first question comes from Chris Donat with Sandler O’Neill, please go ahead.
Chris Donat – Sandler O’Neill & Partners
Good morning, I’m just trying to get a better handle on your exchange traded volumes and seeing if there’s some way we can track them more accurately. If I look back over your volumes historically, it seems like when you go back to say fiscal 2006 and early 07, your exchange traded volumes would be pretty flat quarter on quarter, maybe move by a single digit number and I know you added the professional traders toward the end of fiscal 07. Can you give us a sense of where the volume came from in this past quarter, is it from the professional traders, is it from your regular kind of elevator customers getting more active, is it from new customers?
Bill Dunaway
If we look at kind of the increase in exchange traded volumes from the first quarter to the second quarter, you know about 250,000 of it came from the commodity risk management side, so that’s going to be our core customer base. And about 4 million of that increase came from the clearing and execution segment. You know what you’ve seen is in that clearing and execution segment starting in the fourth quarter of last year, you know you did see that dramatic rise with the addition of that group of professional traders.
And I think in the clearing and execution side you were just really seeing that as the markets start to trade more and more electronically, you get a lot more people, a lot of our professional traders that were on the floors of the exchanges are moving upstairs and are allowed not only to just trade the commodities that they were traditionally dealing with, but trading electronically now they have access to more commodity markets. And it’s just helped drive the continued growth in exchange traded volume.
Chris Donat – Sandler O’Neill & Partners
Okay so this is trading going on in the CME group and at NYMEX and other exchanges also?
Bill Dunaway
And the ICE cleared, we do a lot of what used to be the NYBOT which is now ICE cleared in the soft commodities and at the NYMEX in the energy and the metals.
Chris Donat – Sandler O’Neill & Partners
Okay, so based on that being really only 250,000 contracts coming out of the CRM, it’s not, they’re not really moving that much, it’s more the new professional traders?
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