General

We are the largest futures exchange in the United States for the trading of futures and options on futures, as measured by 2003 annual trading volume. In 2003, our customers, which include our members, traded futures and options on futures contracts with a notional dollar value of $333.7 trillion, making us the world’s largest exchange by this measure. We also have the largest futures and options on futures open interest of any exchange in the world. As of December 31, 2003, our open interest record was 35.4 million contracts, set on December 11, 2003, not including the 2.8 million contracts that we managed for CBOT on that day. Open interest is a widely recognized indicator of the level of customer interest in an exchange’s products.

We bring together buyers and sellers of derivatives products on our open outcry trading floors, on the GLOBEX electronic trading platform and through privately negotiated transactions that we clear. We offer market participants the opportunity to trade futures contracts and options on futures contracts on interest rates, equity, foreign exchange and commodities. Our key products include Eurodollar contracts and contracts based on major U.S. stock indexes, including the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ-100. We also offer contracts for the principal foreign currencies and for a number of commodity products, including cattle, hogs and dairy. We believe several of our key products serve as global financial benchmarks. Our Eurodollar contract provides a benchmark for measuring the relative value of U.S. dollar-denominated, short-term fixed-income securities. Similarly, our S&P 500 Index and NASDAQ-100 Index contracts are closely linked to the benchmark indexes for U.S. equity performance.

Our products provide a means for hedging, speculation and asset allocation relating to the risks associated with interest rate sensitive instruments, equity ownership, changes in the value of foreign currency and changes in the prices of commodity products. Our customer base includes professional traders, financial institutions, institutional and individual investors, major corporations, manufacturers, producers, supranational entities and governments.

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We own our clearing house, which is the largest derivatives clearing entity in the world, and guarantee, clear and settle every contract traded through our exchange. During 2003, we processed an average of approximately 531,000 trade transactions per day. We currently have the capacity to clear more than 2.5 million transactions per day. Our systems are scalable and give us the ability to increase our capacity with little lead time. As of December 31, 2003, we acted as custodian for approximately $37.0 billion in collateral. In 2003, we moved an average of $1.4 billion of settlement funds through our clearing system each day. In addition, 46 exchanges and clearing organizations worldwide have adopted our SPAN risk evaluation system, which is used to determine the appropriate performance bond requirements for trading portfolios. NYMEX and Clearnet-LCH also use CLEARING 21, our state-of-the-art clearing system jointly developed with NYMEX. We, however, do not generate material revenue from the adoption of these systems by other exchanges.

We have a history of innovation in our industry. In the 1960s, we introduced the first livestock futures contract that resulted in the physical delivery of live cattle. In 1972, we introduced the world’s first financial futures contracts when we launched seven foreign exchange futures contracts. That innovation fundamentally changed the nature and scope of futures markets, transforming them from agricultural hedging mechanisms to hedging and risk management markets for financial instruments and financial risks. We also developed the first cash-settled futures in 1981 with the introduction of Eurodollar futures, which is one of the world’s most actively traded futures contract. Cash settlement also enabled us to introduce in 1982 the first successful stock index futures contract, the S&P 500 futures. In 1987, we pioneered the concept of global electronic trading of derivatives contracts, and we subsequently launched the GLOBEX platform in 1992. Today, most of our products trade electronically in addition to on our open outcry trading floors. In 1997, we introduced the first of our E-mini stock index products, which are smaller-sized electronically traded versions of our successful benchmark stock index futures contracts. In April 2003, we entered into an agreement with the Chicago Board of Trade, or CBOT, for us to provide clearing and related services for CBOT futures and options on futures contracts.

CME was founded in 1898 as a not-for-profit corporation. In November 2000, we became the first U.S. financial exchange to demutualize and become a shareholder-owned corporation. As a consequence, we have adopted a for-profit approach to our business, including strategic initiatives aimed at optimizing volume, efficiency and liquidity. We posted record trading volume of 640.2 million contracts in 2003, an increase of 14.6% over 2002, which was previously our busiest year.

We devote substantial resources to introducing new products based on new markets or securities. For example, in 2001, we formed OneChicago, LLC, our joint venture with Chicago Board Options Exchange, or CBOE, and CBOT, to trade single stock futures and futures on narrow-based stock indexes. OneChicago commenced its trading operations in November 2002. In 2003, we added three additional TRAKRS products, which are private label index products developed with Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. TRAKRS, which stands for Total Return Asset Contracts, are a series of non-traditional futures contracts licensed exclusively for us for North America and are the first broad-based index products traded on a U.S. futures exchange that can be sold by securities brokers. In addition, in 2003, we announced plans to list electronically traded futures contracts on the U.S. Consumer Price Index, or CPI. These new contracts began trading on February 8, 2004. In 2003, we also began listing weather products on five European cities and expanded the number of U.S. cities covered by our weather products from five to 15.

Throughout our history, our members have conducted their trading through our open outcry trading facilities. The roots of our open outcry trading began in the late 1800s when our predecessor, the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, established official quotations in butter, eggs, poultry and other farm products. Membership gave the right to participate in the markets, in what was to become open outcry trading, and was expanded over the decades to accommodate new traders in new commodities and financial products. For the year ended December 31, 2003, open outcry represented approximately 54% of our trading volume.

Trading on our open outcry trading floors is conducted exclusively by our members. Our members are individual traders, as well as most of the world’s largest banks, brokerages and investment houses. Prior to the introduction of our electronic trading platform, our members traded only on our open outcry trading floors. Today, our members are able to conduct trading on our open outcry trading floors, electronically through the GLOBEX platform and through privately negotiated transactions that we clear. Members who broker trades executed on our open outcry trading floors generally do not play a role in facilitating the execution of transactions on behalf of customers on GLOBEX.

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Prior to our demutualization, direct access to our markets, whether on our open outcry trading floors or through the GLOBEX platform, was limited to members and those with an exchange permit who met specified qualifications. In connection with our demutualization, we opened access to our markets by allowing unlimited, direct access to the GLOBEX platform for all market participants. Today, any individual or institutional customer guaranteed by a clearing firm is able to obtain direct access to the GLOBEX platform. We have further opened access to our markets by expanding the range of member and non-member customer choices for alternative execution procedures, such as block trading and privately negotiated exchange-for-physical, or EFP, transactions. While our members benefit from market information advantages that may accrue from their proximity to activity on the trading floors, as a result of the increased access to our markets, all market participants now have the ability to view bids and offers in the market. Generally, member customers are charged lower fees than our non-member customers. In 2003, our members were responsible for nearly 80% of our total trading volume.

As a result of our conversion into a for-profit corporation in the fall of 2000, individuals and entities who, at the time, were members and owned trading rights on our exchange became the owners of all our outstanding equity. These individuals and entities continued to own substantially all of our outstanding equity following our reorganization into a holding company structure in December 2001 and our initial public offering in December 2002. As of December 31, 2003, owners of trading rights on our exchange owned, of record, approximately 69% of our Class A common stock.

Our principal executive offices are located at 20 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60606, and our telephone number is 312-930-1000.

Competitive Strengths

We have established ourselves as a premier global marketplace for financial risk management. We believe our principal competitive strengths are:

Highly Liquid Markets. The liquidity in our markets is a key factor in attracting and retaining customers. We have the largest open interest of any exchange in the world of futures and options on futures contracts. As of December 31, 2003, our open interest record was 35.4 million contracts, set on December 11, 2003, not including the 2.8 million contracts that we managed for CBOT on that day. Before 2003, our open interest record was 24.8 million contacts set in 2002. During 2003, we posted record trading volume of 640.2 million contracts, an increase of 14.6% over 2002, making us the most active exchange in the United States and the second most active in the world for the trading of futures and options on futures contracts during that period. By notional value, we are the largest futures exchange in the world, with $333.7 trillion traded in 2003. Our deep and liquid markets tend to attract additional customers, which in turn further enhance our liquidity.

Global Benchmark Products. We believe our key products serve as global benchmarks for valuing and managing risk. Our Eurodollar contract serves as a global benchmark for measuring the relative value of U.S. dollar-denominated short-term fixed-income securities. Similarly, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ-100 indexes are considered primary tools for benchmarking investment performance against U.S. equity market exposure. Our S&P 500 Index and NASDAQ-100 Index contracts, which are based on these benchmarks, are recognized by our customers as efficient tools for managing and hedging their equity market risks.

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Diverse Portfolio of Products and Services. We differentiate ourselves from our competitors by developing and offering to our customers a diverse array of products, as well as a broad range of trade execution and clearing services. We have a long history of developing innovative interest rate, equity, foreign exchange and commodity products designed to appeal to institutional and individual customers. We offer both open outcry auction trading and electronic order-matching services, and we provide facilities to clear privately negotiated transactions. Our markets provide important risk management tools to our customers, which include leading global and financial institutions. We work closely with our customers to create markets and products that meet their needs. These relationships help us to anticipate and lead industry changes.

Wholly Owned Clearing House. We own our clearing house, which guarantees, clears and settles every contract traded through our exchange and futures and options on futures contracts traded through CBOT. During 2003, we processed an average of approximately 531,000 trade transactions per day. We currently have the capacity to clear more than 2.5 million transactions per day, and our scalable systems give us the ability to further increase our capacity, with little lead time. In April 2003, we entered into an agreement with CBOT for us to provide clearing and related services for CBOT futures and options on futures contracts. Pursuant to this agreement, we began providing clearing services on November 24, 2003 for some CBOT products and, as of January 2, 2004, we began clearing all of CBOT’s products. As of December 31, 2003, we acted as custodian for approximately $37.0 billion in performance bond collateral and, in 2003, moved an average of $1.4 billion of settlement funds through our clearing system each day. We believe our performance guarantee is a major attraction of our markets, particularly compared to the over-the-counter, or OTC, markets, because it substantially reduces counterparty risk. Our clearing system permits more efficient use of capital for our customers by allowing netting of long and short positions in a single type of contract and providing risk offset and cross-margining arrangements with several other leading clearing houses. In addition, ownership of our clearing house enables us to more quickly and efficiently bring new products to market through coordination of our clearing functions with our product development, technology, market regulation and other risk management activities. Our current capacity ensures that we are able to service peak volumes, provide clearing services to CBOT, introduce new products with high volume potential and provide clearing services to other exchanges in the future.

Proven and Scalable Technology. We believe our ability to use technology effectively has been a key factor in the successful development of our business. As a result of significant investments in our technology asset base, we possess fast, reliable and fully integrated trading and clearing systems. Our highly scalable systems are designed to accommodate additional products with relatively limited modifications and low incremental costs. The core components of our system infrastructure for trading, clearing and risk management are becoming widely adopted throughout the futures industry, resulting in common interfaces and efficiencies for intermediaries and customers. For example, our SPAN risk evaluation system has been adopted by 46 exchanges and clearing organizations worldwide. In addition, CLEARING 21, our state-of-the-art clearing system jointly developed with NYMEX, is being used by NYMEX and Clearnet-LCH.

Global Reach. Globalization of financial markets is expanding the customer base for futures products beyond traditional boundaries. Our electronic trading services, which are available more than 23 hours a day and five days per week, position us to take advantage of this development. We have established strategic relationships with other exchanges and clearing houses around the world to enable our customers to gain further capital and execution efficiencies. These relationships are intended to extend the market reach of our global derivatives business. We received $7.1 million in clearing and transaction fees from our strategic relationships during the year ended December 31, 2003. To further our global strategy, in early 2002, we installed a local telecommunications hub in London. We plan to further expand our global reach by installing similar hubs in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfort, Gibraltar, Milan and Paris in 2004. These hubs will further reduce connectivity costs and will house direct electronic connections between Europe and our GLOBEX electronic trading platform. As part of our strategy, in November 2003 we also introduced a pricing incentive program that significantly reduces the total transaction fees on all GLOBEX products for proprietary trading groups and trading arcades located in Europe. Additionally, in September 2003, we entered into an agreement with Bloomberg L.P to expand the global distribution of our electronically traded contracts by allowing all Bloomberg terminals worldwide access to our products on GLOBEX.

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Growth Strategy

Globalization, deregulation and advances in technology offer significant opportunities for expanding futures markets, and exchange markets generally. We intend to increase our trading volumes, revenues and profitability by capitalizing on these opportunities through implementation of the following four strategies:

Expand Our Current Core Business. We intend to advance our position as a leader in the futures industry by expanding customer access to our markets and services, offering additional trade execution choices and enhancing our market data and information products.

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Add New Products. We develop new products and product line extensions based on research and development in collaboration with our customers and financial services firms. We have created modified versions of some of our existing products in order to attract new types of customers. For example, in 1997 and 1999, respectively, we introduced E-mini versions of our larger open outcry-traded S&P 500 and NASDAQ-100 futures contracts. By creating smaller-sized products and offering electronic trading services in them, we have successfully expanded our customer base and overall volume. We introduced E-mini Russell 2000 futures contracts in October 2001, and in January 2002, we initiated trading in E-mini S&P MidCap 400 futures contracts, another smaller scale version of one of our larger contracts that offers exposure to small- and medium-sized capitalization company stocks. We also seek to introduce new contracts that complement our existing product line. In April 2003, we launched Russell 1000 futures contracts. In combination with our other products, the new contract offers exposure to the Russell 3000 universe of stocks, representing 98% of the investable U.S. equity market, based on total market capitalization. In October 2003, we launched our E-mini NASDAQ Composite Index, which we believe is a broad, well diversified real-time representation of the performance of NASDAQ-listed companies.

In July 2002, we launched TRAKRS. TRAKRS are designed to enable customers to track an index of stocks, bonds, currencies or other financial instruments. Long-Short Technology TRAKRS were the first in this new product line. We subsequently introduced in 2002, Select 50 TRAKRS contracts and LMC TRAKRS, which identify value and growth stocks of lower market capitalization companies. In 2003, Commodity TRAKRS, Euro Currency TRAKRS and Gold TRAKRS were launched. TRAKRS differ from traditional futures contracts in that most non-institutional customers who purchase these contracts are required to post 100% of the TRAKRS market value at the time of the purchase. As a result, these customers will not be subject to margin calls or any requirement to make any additional payments throughout the life of their TRAKRS positions.

In September 2002, we began to introduce futures contracts based on industry sectors within the S&P 500 Index. We also intend to continue expanding our derivatives product lines by introducing contracts based on new markets or securities, such as single stock futures and futures on narrow-based stock indexes. OneChicago, our joint venture with CBOE and CBOT, initiated trading of 21 single stock futures on November 8, 2002, and, as of December 31, 2003, listed 107 single stock, narrow-based index and exchange-traded fund futures. In addition, we intend to continue working with emerging cash market trading platforms to jointly develop innovative futures products.

In March 2003, we launched futures and options on futures based on a new dollar index, the CME$INDEX, a geometric index of seven foreign currencies that is weighted to reflect the relative competitiveness of U.S. goods in foreign markets. The CME$INDEX provides investors with a new instrument for euro currency speculation and risk management. The seven currencies included in the CME$INDEX index are the European Union euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Swiss franc, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar and Swedish krona.

On February 8, 2004, we launched new electronically traded futures contracts on the CPI. These new CPI contracts are the first product we have listed on a major economic indicator.

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Provide Transaction Processing Services and Other Business Services to Third Parties. We intend to leverage our existing capacity, scalable technology and business processes to provide a broad range of services to other exchanges, clearing organizations and e-marketplaces. We intend to offer services, including clearing and settlement processing and risk management, market structuring, product structuring and trade execution platforms. We believe we can differentiate ourselves from our competitors by offering some or all of these services on a cost-effective basis in combination with the potential to access our broad distribution, customer base and experienced liquidity providers. Users of our clearing services also have the potential to gain substantial capital and collateral efficiencies for their clearing firms. For example, in April 2003, we entered into an agreement with CBOT for us to provide clearing and related services for CBOT futures and options on futures contracts. Pursuant to this agreement, we began providing clearing services for CBOT on November 24, 2003 and, as of January 2, 2004, we began clearing all of CBOT’s products. The arrangement provides clearing firms and customers with the potential to gain operational, performance bond and capital efficiencies, as well as a combined risk capital pool and other expected cost savings. As a result of our agreement with CBOT, our clearing house is the largest derivatives clearing organization for futures and options on futures in the world. We cleared 9.5 million contracts for CBOT in 2003. Open interest for CBOT contracts cleared by us was 2.7 million contracts at December 31, 2003.

Pursue Select Alliances and Acquisitions. We plan to supplement our internal growth through the formation of joint ventures or alliances and select acquisitions of businesses or technologies. We will seek alliances and acquisitions that help us to enter new markets, provide services that we currently do not offer, open access to our markets or advance our technology. For example, in November 2003, we extended our mutual offset agreement, or MOS agreement, with the Singapore Derivatives Exchange Ltd. and added the yen-based Nikkei 225 futures contract to the agreement in January 2004. We also acquired the technology-related assets and intellectual property of Liquidity Direct in January 2004 to facilitate the trading of our options on futures contracts. In 2002, we entered into an agreement with NYMEX to introduce smaller-sized versions of key NYMEX energy futures contracts for trading on our GLOBEX electronic trading platform. The products, based on our successful E-mini stock index contracts, are called e-miNY energy futures and clear at the NYMEX clearing house. On June 17, 2002, e-miNY crude oil and natural gas futures contracts began trading.

Products

Our broad range of products includes futures contracts and options on futures contracts based on interest rates, equity, foreign exchange and commodities. Our products are traded through our open outcry auction markets, through the GLOBEX electronic trading platform or in privately negotiated transactions that we clear. For the year ended December 31, 2003, we derived $430.6 million, or 80.0% of our net revenues, from fees associated with trading and clearing products on or through our exchange. These fees include per contract charges for trade execution, clearing and GLOBEX fees. Fees are charged at various rates based on the product traded, the method of trade and the exchange trading privileges of the customer making the trade. Generally, members are charged lower fees than non-members. Certain of our customers benefit from volume discounts and limits on fees as part of our effort to encourage increased liquidity in our markets. Our markets also generate valuable data and information regarding pricing and trading activity in our products. Revenues from market data products totaled $53.2 million, or 9.9% of our net revenues, in 2003.

We identify new products by monitoring economic trends and their impact on the risk management and speculative needs of our existing and prospective customers. Historically, we have successfully introduced a variety of new futures products. We pioneered the trading of foreign exchange futures in 1972 and Eurodollar futures, the first cash-settled futures contracts listed for trading, in 1981. In 1982, we were the first to introduce a successful stock index futures contract, the S&P 500 Index futures contract, and in 1996 we introduced the NASDAQ-100 Index futures contract. We believe the S&P 500 Index and the NASDAQ-100 Index are the global benchmarks for managing exposure to the U.S. stock markets, and our futures contracts based on them are among the most successful products in our industry. The smaller, electronically traded versions of these contracts, the E-mini S&P 500 Index futures and the E-mini NASDAQ-100 Index futures, were introduced in 1997 and 1999, respectively.

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The following table shows the total notional value and average daily volume of contracts traded in our four principal product groups for the years ended December 31, 2003, 2002 and 2001.

Interest Rate Products. Our interest rate products include our global benchmark Eurodollar futures contracts. Eurodollars are U.S. dollar bank deposits outside the United States. Eurodollar futures contracts are short-term interest rate products and constitute one of the most successful products in our industry and one of the most actively traded futures contracts in the world. Open interest on Eurodollar futures and options on futures contracts traded on our exchange was approximately 13.7 million contracts on December 31, 2003, representing a notional value of approximately $31.6 trillion. We also trade contracts based on other short-term interest rates, such as one-month LIBOR, which stands for the London Interbank Offered Rate, and Euroyen. Interest rate products represented 48.6% of our trading volume during 2003, an average of approximately 1.2 million contracts per day.

The growth of our Eurodollar futures market has been driven by the general acceptance of the U.S. dollar as the principal reserve currency for financial institutions throughout the world. As a result, Eurodollar deposits have significance in the international capital markets. Participants in our Eurodollar futures market are generally major domestic and international banks and other financial institutions that face interest rate risks from their lending and borrowing activities, their activities as dealers in OTC interest rate swaps and structured derivatives products and their proprietary trading activities. Many of these participants use our Eurodollar and other interest rate contracts to hedge or arbitrage their money market swaps or convert their interest rate exposure from a fixed rate to a floating rate or a floating rate to a fixed rate. Asset managers also use our interest rate products to lengthen the effective maturity of short-term investment assets by buying futures contracts, or shorten the effective maturity by selling futures. Our contracts are an attractive alternative when physical restructuring of a portfolio is not possible or when futures transaction costs are lower than the cash market transaction costs. In 1999, we initiated simultaneous, side-by-side electronic trading in our Eurodollar contracts. Trading in our Eurodollar contracts often involves complex trading strategies that we believe cannot be fully accommodated by existing electronic trading platforms. Accordingly, electronic trading in our Eurodollar contracts initially achieved only limited market acceptance. We continue to develop and implement new electronic functionality to accommodate trading strategies required for electronic trading of Eurodollar contracts. In 2003, we launched our Eagle Project, which enables customers to execute trades electronically in the first eight quarterly expirations and 22 corresponding calendar spreads in Eurodollar futures. The introduction of this enhanced functionality contributed to a 45% increase in electronic trading of our Eurodollar futures contracts during 2003. This technology closely replicates Eurodollar trading conventions employed in open outcry and is designed to help maintain our leadership in Eurodollar futures. In January 2004, to further provide market users with innovative technology solutions to support their electronic trading needs, we acquired the technology-related assets and intellectual property of Liquidity Direct to incorporate its options and spread trading technology into our GLOBEX electronic trading platform. Liquidity Direct has developed an innovative patent-pending technology to effectively facilitate trading of the complex combinations and spreads typically used with options products in a fully transparent and competitive execution environment. We intend to introduce more functionality that will accommodate other complex trading strategies electronically.

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Our interest rate product trading volume grew significantly from 1998 to 2002. The increase was due primarily to the volatility of short-term interest rates, monetary policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and a decline in the issuance of U.S. Treasury securities. With less availability of U.S. Treasury securities, swap dealers, who represent a significant group of our customers, turned to our Eurodollar contract as a benchmark for valuing fixed-income obligations and as a tool for managing dollar-denominated interest rate exposure. In 2003, we experienced modest growth of our interest rate product trading volume, with total 2003 trading volume up 0.6% over 2002.

We intend to increase our revenues from our interest rate product sector by optimizing pricing of existing products and introducing new products to increase our trading volume. We have been active in adopting new policies and practices that are closely aligned with customer demand and designed to promote enhanced market penetration.

Equity Products. We have been a leader in stock index futures since we began offering these products in 1982 and remain the largest exchange in the world for trading stock index futures. Stock index futures products permit investors to obtain exposure, for hedging or speculative purposes, to a change in the weighting of one or more equity market sectors more efficiently than by buying or selling the underlying securities. We offer trading in futures contracts based upon the S&P 500 Index and NASDAQ-100 Index, other small-, medium- and large-capitalization domestic indexes and indexes on foreign equity markets. As of December 31, 2003, our market share in all U.S. listed stock index futures was approximately 95%, based on the number of contracts traded.

Our total trading volume for stock index products rose 31.6% in 2003, to 286.2 million contracts, from 217.5 million contracts in 2002. Trading in stock index futures products represented 44.7% of our total trading volume during 2003, an average of more than 1.1 million contracts per day. In 2003, 90.4% of our stock index product trading volume was based on the S&P 500 Index and the NASDAQ-100 Index. The total notional value of S&P 500 futures and options on futures contracts traded on our exchange was approximately $13.8 trillion during 2003, compared to the approximately $9.4 trillion value of stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In addition, the notional value of our stock index futures contracts is significantly larger than the comparable exchange-traded fund, which is a basket of securities designed to track an index but trades on a securities exchange or electronic communications network like a single stock. In 2003, the total notional value of our S&P 500 futures contracts was more than $12.6 trillion, compared with approximately $1.0 trillion for S&P 500 Depositary Receipts. In 2003, the total notional value of our NASDAQ-100 futures contracts was approximately $2.2 trillion, compared to approximately $0.6 trillion for the QQQs, which is the NASDAQ-100 Index tracking stock.

Standard & Poor’s Corporation designed and maintains the S&P 500 Index to be a proxy for a diversified equity portfolio representing a broad cross-section of the U.S. equity markets. The Index is based on the stock prices of 500 large-capitalization companies. We have an exclusive license with Standard & Poor’s until 2008. The NASDAQ-100 Index is based on the 100 largest non-financial stocks listed on the NASDAQ National Market. We have a license with Nasdaq that allows us to offer the NASDAQ-100 Index and NASDAQ Composite contracts exclusively until October 2011. For a more detailed discussion of these license agreements, see the section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K entitled “Item 1. Business—Licensing Agreements.” Our standard S&P and NASDAQ products are traded through our open outcry facilities during regular trading hours and on GLOBEX after the close of open outcry trading.

We also offer futures and, in some cases, options on futures contracts, on the S&P MidCap 400, the S&P SmallCap 600, the S&P/BARRA Growth and Value indexes, which are based on data compiled by S&P and BARRA, Inc., the Nikkei Stock Average, the S&P/TOPIX 150, the Russell 1000 Stock Price Index, the Russell 2000 Stock Price Index and the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. In July 2002, we launched TRAKRS, a private label index product developed with Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. TRAKRS are a series of non-traditional futures contracts licensed exclusively to us for North America, and are the first broad-based index products traded on a U.S. futures exchange that can be sold by securities brokers.

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TRAKRS are designed to enable customers to track an index of stocks, bonds, currencies or other financial instruments. Long-Short Technology TRAKRS were the first in this product line. We subsequently introduced Select 50 TRAKRS and LMC TRAKRS in 2002. Trading in Commodity TRAKRS commenced in July 2003. EuroCurrency TRAKRS began trading in August 2003 and Gold TRAKRS in December 2003. We also launched our second round of our Long-Short Technology TRAKRS in January 2004. TRAKRS differ from traditional futures contracts in that most non-institutional customers who purchase these contracts are required to post 100% of the TRAKRS market value at the time of purchase. As a result, these customers will not be subject to margin calls or any requirement to make any additional payments throughout the life of their TRAKRS positions. In September 2002, we introduced SPCTR futures contracts based on subsets of the S&P 500 Index: Technology and Financial. Each contract is sized at $125 times the respective index price, making the contract size comparable to the E-mini stock index contracts.

We believe the variety of our stock index futures products appeals to a broad group of equity investors. These investors include public and private pension funds, investment companies, mutual funds, insurance companies and other financial services companies that benchmark their investment performance to different segments of the equity markets.

In 1997, we launched our E-mini S&P 500 futures contracts. We followed this highly successful new product offering with the introduction of E-mini NASDAQ-100 futures contracts in 1999. E-mini contracts are traded exclusively on our electronic GLOBEX platform and are one-fifth the size of their standard counterparts. These products are designed to address the growing demand for stock index derivatives and electronically traded products from individual traders and small institutions. Trading volumes in these products have grown rapidly , achieving new volume and open interest records on a regular basis during 2002 and 2003. This growth is attributable to the benefits of stock index futures, electronic market access and, prior to 2003, significant volatility in the U.S. equity markets. In October 2001, we also introduced E-mini Russell 2000 Index futures. In January 2002, we introduced an E-mini version of our S&P MidCap 400 futures contract. In October 2003, we launched our E-mini futures contracts on the NASDAQ Composite Index. This contract provides a product that tracks the entire NASDAQ Stock Market in contrast to the NASDAQ-100 Index which includes only the top 100 non-financial stocks listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market.

We believe our leading market position in equity products is a result of the liquidity of our markets, the status of the S&P 500 Index and the NASDAQ-100 Index as two of the principal U.S. financial standards for benchmarking stock market returns and the appeal to investors and traders of our E-mini products and GLOBEX. We believe future growth in our stock index products will come from expanding customer access to our electronic markets, as well as further educating the marketplace on the benefits of these products.

Other equity product growth opportunities are expected to come from the introduction of single stock futures and futures on narrow-based stock indexes. Industry deregulation permits futures and securities exchanges to offer single stock futures and futures contracts on narrow-based stock indexes. Single stock futures allow investors to obtain exposure, for hedging or speculative purposes, that is economically equivalent to owning or shorting an individual stock without actually buying or selling the stock. They are designed to offer leverage, ease of trading and less expensive, more customized risk management strategies than equity options, equity swaps and stock lending transactions. In November 2002, OneChicago, our joint venture with CBOE and CBOT, commenced its trading operations to trade single stock futures contracts on stocks trading worldwide as well as futures on narrow-based stock indexes. Under the terms of our operating agreement, we own approximately a 40% interest in OneChicago, CBOE owns approximately a 40% interest and CBOT and management each own a minority interest. Under the terms of our operating agreement, until May 31, 2005 we are restricted from in any way, directly or indirectly, engaging in the business of trading, marketing, regulating, selling, purchasing, clearing or settling transactions in single stock futures other than in conjunction with the joint venture. This restriction on our ability to compete applies whether or not we remain part of the joint venture, but it does not apply to futures based on narrow-based stock indexes.

Foreign Exchange Products. We became the first exchange to introduce financial futures when we launched foreign exchange futures in 1972. Since that time we have built a strong presence in foreign exchange futures. Institutions such as banks, hedge funds, commodity trading advisors, corporations and individuals use these products to manage their risks associated with, or speculate on, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates. Foreign exchange products represented 5.3% of our trading volume in 2003, an average of approximately 135,000 contracts per day. We offer futures and options on futures contracts on 30 currencies, including the European Union euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar, Mexican peso, Australian dollar, Brazilian real, New Zealand dollar and South African rand.

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Our total foreign exchange trading volume increased 40.2% during 2003 from 2002. Previously, our volume was impacted by the introduction of the euro and subsequent phasing out of many of the major European currencies, the continuing consolidation in the financial institutions sector, increased use of internal netting mechanisms by our customers and wide use of electronic trading for foreign exchange transactions by competing markets. We have begun improving the performance of this product sector by expanding electronic trading in our foreign exchange products. We introduced side-by-side electronic and open outcry trading of foreign exchange futures in April 2001. We believe this change has helped facilitate the increase in volume in these products. In 2003, electronically traded foreign exchange futures volume increased 100.0% over 2002, from approximately 7.5 million contracts to nearly 14.9 million contracts and open outcry trading increased 6.2%, from 10.9 million contracts in 2002 to 11.5 million contracts in 2003.

In May 2002, we introduced 13 new cross-rate foreign exchange futures contracts, consisting of two U.S. dollar-based contracts and 11 non-dollar-based contracts.

We expect the growth in our foreign exchange product line to come from further transitioning to electronic trading. This will allow us to compete more effectively in an environment where electronic execution is growing rapidly and accounts for a significant portion of global foreign exchange volume. The foreign exchange interbank spot market is heavily reliant on electronic trading, with the majority of trades brokered online. We continue to increase both functionality and distribution and are in discussions to add electronic interfaces with OTC market electronic trading platforms. We believe these interfaces, if successfully implemented, will position us to increase our foreign exchange futures volume and expand our product offerings. In March 2003, we launched futures contracts and options on futures contracts based on a new dollar index, the CME$INDEX, a geometric index of seven foreign currencies that is weighted to reflect the relative competitiveness of U.S. goods in foreign markets. CME$INDEX provides investors with a new instrument for currency speculation and risk management. The seven currencies included in the index are the European Union euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Swiss franc, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar and Swedish krona.

Commodity Products. Commodity products were our only products when our exchange first opened for business. We have maintained a strong franchise in our commodity products, including futures contracts based on cattle, hogs, pork bellies, lumber, weather and dairy products. Commodity products accounted for 1.4% of our trading volume during 2003, an average of more than 35,000 contracts per day. These products provide hedging tools for our customers who deal in tangible physical commodities, including agricultural producers of commodities and food processors. Our commodity products are traded through our open outcry and electronic trading execution facilities. We introduced side-by-side electronic and open outcry trading of lean hog, live cattle and feeder cattle futures in 2002 and of frozen pork bellies in 2003.

Trading volume for our commodity products has been relatively stable in recent years. We believe continuing consolidation and restructuring in the agricultural sector, coupled with the reduction or elimination of government subsidies and the resulting increase in demand for risk management in this sector, could create growth in our commodity markets as more producers and processors adopt formal hedging and risk management programs.

We intend to leverage our experience in trading futures on physical commodities to jointly develop new commodity products with operators of electronic, cash and derivatives trading platforms. For example, in 2002 we entered into an agreement with NYMEX to introduce smaller-sized versions of key NYMEX energy futures contracts for trading on our GLOBEX electronic trading platform. The products, based on our successful E-mini stock index contracts, are called e-miNY energy futures and clear at the NYMEX clearing house. In June 2002, e-miNY crude oil and natural gas futures contracts began trading.

Market Data and Information Products. Our markets generate valuable information regarding prices and trading activity in our products. The market data we supply is central to trading activity in our products and to trading activity in related cash and derivatives markets. We sell our market data, which includes information about bids, offers, trades and trade size, to banks, broker-dealers, pension funds, investment companies, mutual funds, insurance companies, individual investors and other financial services companies or organizations that use our markets or monitor general economic conditions. We distribute our market data directly to our electronic trading customers as part of their access to our markets through our electronic facilities. We also distribute market data via dedicated networks to approximately 210 worldwide quote vendors who consolidate our market data with that from other exchanges, other third party data providers and news services, and then resell their consolidated data. As of December 31, 2003, approximately 60,000

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subscribers displayed our data on approximately 174,000 screens. Revenues from market data products totaled $53.2 million, or 9.9% of our net revenues, in 2003.

We continue to enhance our current market data and information product offerings by packaging the basic data we have traditionally offered with advanced analytical data and information. We have created marketing programs to increase the use of our market data. We are developing new business relationships with companies that develop value-added computer-based applications that process our market data to provide specific insights into the dynamics of trading activity in our products.

In March 2002, we expanded the scope of our market data offerings by providing CME E-quotes, direct, real-time price quotes, to the trading community over the Internet, through our Web site. The new service enables users to integrate interactive charting and news services with market data, building customized packages of data, charting and news that fit their particular needs. CME E-quotes received a 2002 European Banking Technology Award for the best use of information technology in the wholesale banking sector. In June 2002, enhancements to our market data interface software reduced customers’ bandwidth requirements 65% to 70%.

In August 2002, we introduced CME E-history to automate the process of supplying users with historical price data for our futures and options on futures contracts. We launched Eagle-i in March 2003, featuring real-time quotes and implied prices for outright and calendar spreads on Eurodollar contracts traded on the GLOBEX platform. In April 2003, we launched E-px, which provides complete real-time pack and bundle prices as well as the pricing data for all 40 underlying Eurodollar contracts. In May 2003, our E-quivalents product, which displays our real-time currency futures prices and quantities in spot foreign exchange convention, was made available to anyone visiting our Web site.

Execution

Our trade execution facilities consist of our open outcry trading pits and the GLOBEX electronic trading platform. Both of these execution facilities offer our customers immediate trade execution, anonymity and price transparency and are state-of-the-art trading environments supported by substantial infrastructure and technology for order routing, trade reporting, market data dissemination and market surveillance and regulation. In addition, trades can be executed through privately negotiated transactions that are cleared and settled through our clearing house. The chart below shows the range of trade execution choices we provide our customers in some of our key products.

Open Outcry Trading. Open outcry trading represented approximately 54% of our total trading volume in 2003. The trading pits are the centralized meeting place for floor traders and floor brokers representing customer orders to trade contracts. The trading floors, covering approximately 70,000 square feet, have tiered booths surrounding the pits from which clearing firm personnel can communicate with customers regarding current market activity and prices and receive orders either electronically or by telephone. In addition, our trading floors display current market information and news on electronic wallboards hung above the pits. During 2003, approximately 44% of our clearing and transaction fee revenues were derived from open outcry trading.

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GLOBEX Electronic Trading. We began electronic trading in 1992 using a system developed in partnership with Reuters. Our second generation electronic trading platform was introduced in 1998, and is based on the Nouveau Système de Cotation, or NSC, owned and licensed to us by Euronext-Paris, a subsidiary of Euronext N.V. GLOBEX maintains an electronic, centralized order book and trade execution algorithm for futures contracts and options on futures contracts and allows users to enter orders directly into the order book. Initially, these systems were used to offer our products to customers after the close of our regular daytime trading sessions. Today, however, we trade some of our most successful products on the GLOBEX platform more than 23 hours a day, five days a week. In 2003, 44.1% of our trading volume was executed using GLOBEX, compared to 35.5% in 2002. Our electronic volume has grown rapidly during the last five years. Electronic trading volume has increased from nearly 16.1 million contracts in 1999 to nearly 282.4 million contracts in 2003. GLOBEX volume exceeded one million contracts for a single day for the first time on June 12, 2002. As of December 31, 2003, GLOBEX had achieved 225 days of volume greater than one million contracts, excluding the volume attributable to the first-day trading volumes of TRAKRS. During 2003, approximately 47% of our clearing and transaction fee revenues were derived from electronic trading. This was the first year that the percentage of our clearing and transaction fee revenues derived from electronic trading exceeded that derived from open outcry trading.

Privately Negotiated Transactions. In addition to offering traditional open outcry and electronic trading through the GLOBEX platform, we permit qualified customers to trade our products by entering into privately negotiated EFP and exchange basis facility, or EBF, transactions and block trades, which are reported and included in the market data we distribute. We also clear, settle and guarantee these transactions through our clearing house. Some market participants value privately negotiated transactions as a way to ensure that large transactions can be completed at a single price or in a single transaction while preserving their ability to effectively complete a hedging, risk management or other trading strategy. During 2003, approximately 9% of our clearing and transaction fee revenues were derived from this type of trading.

EFP and EBF transactions involve privately negotiated exchanges of futures contracts for cash positions or other qualified instruments. While EFP capabilities have been available for many years, and constitute a significant and profitable segment of our foreign exchange futures trading, EFPs have been offered on a restricted basis in some of our other markets. We have taken steps to liberalize our trading policies, including extending EBF capabilities to all Eurodollar futures contracts.

A block trade is the privately negotiated purchase and sale of futures contracts. Block trading was introduced on our exchange in late 2000, and volume has been limited to date. We believe block trading provides an important source of access designed to appeal to large-scale institutional traders. Originally, these transactions were limited to a certain number of contracts and required high minimum quantity thresholds along with a fee surcharge. We have implemented pricing and trading rules designed to increase customer participation. We intend to continue to enhance the utility of EFP and block transactions while maintaining an appropriate balance with the transactions conducted within the open outcry and electronic trading environments.

Clearing

We operate our own clearing house that clears, settles and guarantees the performance of all transactions matched through our execution facilities and futures and options on futures contracts traded through CBOT. Many derivatives exchanges do not provide clearing services for trades matched through their execution facilities, relying instead on outside clearing houses to provide these services. Ownership and control of our own clearing house enables us to capture the revenue associated with both the trading and clearing of our products. This is particularly important for trade execution alternatives such as block trades, where we can derive a higher per trade clearing fee compared to other trades. By owning our clearing house, we also control the cost structure and the technology development cycle for our clearing services. It also helps us manage our new product initiatives without being dependent on an outside entity. We believe having an integrated clearing function provides significant competitive advantages. Additionally, owning our own clearing house allows us to provide clearing services to other exchanges, such as CBOT.

During 2003, we processed an average of approximately 531,000 trade transactions per day, with an average transaction size of 9.5 contracts. We maintain the largest futures and options on futures open interest of any exchange in the world. As of December 31, 2003, our open interest stood at approximately 29.7 million contracts, not including CBOT contracts that we managed for CBOT. Our open interest record was approximately 35.4 million contracts, set on December 11, 2003, not including the 2.8 million contracts that we managed for CBOT on that day. As of December 31, 2003, we acted as custodian for approximately $37.0 billion in performance bond collateral deposited by our clearing firms and, during 2003, we moved an average of approximately $1.4 billion a day in settlement funds through our clearing system. In addition, our clearing house guarantees the performance of our contracts with a financial safeguards package of approximately $3.4 billion.

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In April 2003, we entered into an agreement with CBOT to provide clearing and related services for CBOT futures and options on futures contracts transacted through CBOT’s execution facilities. Pursuant to this agreement, we began providing clearing services on November 24, 2003 for a subset of CBOT’s products and, as of January 2, 2004, we began clearing all of CBOT’s remaining products. In providing clearing services to CBOT, our clearing house clears, settles and guarantees all CBOT transactions, using the full resources of our clearing processes and financial safeguards package. Open interest in CBOT products cleared by our clearing house on December 31, 2003 was 2.7 million contracts. On January 2, 2004, when we began clearing all of CBOT’s products, open interest in CBOT products increased to 7.3 million contracts.

The clearing function provides three primary benefits to our markets: efficient, high-volume transaction processing; cost and capital efficiencies; and a reliable credit guarantee. The services we provide can be broadly categorized as follows:

Transaction Processing and Position Management. We developed a state-of-the-art clearing system, CLEARING 21, in conjunction with NYMEX, to provide high quality clearing services. This system processes reported trades and positions on a real-time basis, providing users with instantaneous information on trades, positions and risk exposure. CLEARING 21 is able to process trades in futures and options products, securities and cash instruments. CLEARING 21 can also support complex new product types, including combinations, options on combinations, options on options, swaps, repurchase and reverse repurchase agreements, and other instruments. Through CLEARING 21 user interfaces, our clearing firms can electronically manage their positions, exercise options, enter transactions related to foreign exchange deliveries, manage collateral posted to meet performance bond requirements and access all of our other online applications. Together with our order routing and trade matching services, we offer straight-through electronic processing of transactions in which an order is electronically routed, matched, cleared and made available to the clearing firm’s back-office systems for further processing.

Cross-Margining and Mutual Offset Services. We have led the derivatives industry in establishing cross-margining agreements with other leading clearing houses. Cross-margining arrangements reduce capital costs for clearing firms and our customers. These agreements permit an individual clearing house to recognize a clearing firm’s open positions at other participating clearing houses, and clearing firms are able to offset risks of positions held at one clearing house against those held at other participating clearing houses. This reduces the need for collateral deposits by the clearing firm. For example, our cross-margining program with the Options Clearing Corporation reduces performance bond requirements for our members by approximately $953 million a day. We have implemented cross-margining arrangements with the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation, formerly the Government Securities Clearing Corporation, and Clearnet-LCH for positions at the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange. We have also implemented a cross-margining arrangement with NYMEX in connection with our agreement to offer e-miNY energy futures. In addition, our MOS Agreement with the Singapore Derivatives Exchange, which has been in place since 1984, allows a clearing firm of either exchange initiating trades in certain products on either exchange to execute after-hours trades at the other exchange in those products and then transfer them back to the originating exchange. This MOS enables firms to seamlessly execute trades at either exchange virtually 24 hours per day.

Market Protection and Risk Management. Our clearing house guarantee of performance is a significant attraction, and an important part of the functioning, of our exchange. Because of this guarantee, our customers do not need to evaluate the credit of each potential counterparty or limit themselves to a selected set of counterparties. This flexibility increases the potential liquidity available for each trade. Additionally, the substitution of our clearing house as the counterparty to every transaction allows our customers to establish a position with one party and then to offset the position with another party. This contract netting process provides our customers with significant flexibility in establishing and adjusting positions.

In order to ensure performance, we establish and monitor financial requirements for our clearing firms. We also set minimum performance bond requirements for our traded products. Our clearing house uses our proprietary SPAN software, which determines

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the appropriate performance bond requirements by simulating the gains and losses of complex portfolios. We typically hold performance bond collateral to cover at least 95% of price changes for a given product within a given historical period. Performance bond requirements for a clearing firm’s or customer’s overall portfolio are calculated using SPAN.

At each settlement cycle, our clearing house values at the market price prevailing at the time, or marks-to-market, all open positions and requires payments from clearing firms whose positions have lost value and makes payments to clearing firms whose positions have gained value. Our clearing house marks-to-market all open positions at least twice a day, and more often if market volatility warrants. Marking-to-market provides both participants in a transaction with an accounting of their financial obligations under the contract.

Having a mark-to-market cycle of a minimum of two times a day helps protect the financial integrity of our clearing house, our clearing firms and market participants. This allows our clearing house to identify quickly any clearing firms that may not be able to satisfy the financial obligations resulting from changes in the prices of their open contracts before those financial obligations become exceptionally large and jeopardize the ability of our clearing house to ensure performance of their open positions.

In the unlikely event of a payment default by a clearing firm, we would first apply assets of the clearing firm to cover its payment obligation. These assets include security deposits, performance bonds and any other available assets, such as the proceeds from the sale of Class A and Class B common stock and memberships of the clearing firm at our exchange owned by or assigned to the clearing firm. Thereafter, if the payment default remains unsatisfied, we would use our surplus funds, security deposits of other clearing firms and funds collected through an assessment against all other solvent clearing firms to satisfy the deficit. We have a secured, committed $750.0 million line of credit with a consortium of banks in order to provide additional liquidity to address a clearing firm payment default. The credit agreement requires us to pledge clearing firm security deposits held by us in the form of U.S. Treasury or agency securities, as well as security deposit funds in our second Interest Earning Facility program, called IEF2, to the line of credit custodian prior to drawing on the line. Performance bond collateral of a defaulting clearing firm may also be used to secure a draw on the line. This line of credit may also be utilized if there is a temporary disruption with the domestic payments system that would delay settlement payments between our clearing house and clearing firms.

The following shows the available assets of our clearing house at December 31, 2003 in the event of a payment default by a clearing firm:

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Settlement, Collateral and Delivery Services. We manage final settlement in all of our contracts, including cash settlement, physical delivery of selected commodities, and option exercises and assignments. Because some initial and maintenance performance bonds from clearing firms, as well as mark-to-market obligations on some of our contracts, are denominated in various foreign currencies, we offer multi-currency margin and settlement services. We also offer the Moneychanger Service to our clearing firms. This service provides members with access to overnight funds in various foreign currencies at competitive bid/ask spreads free of charge to satisfy the terms of a foreign currency denominated futures contract.

Although more than 95% of all futures contracts are liquidated before the expiration of the contract, the underlying financial instruments or commodities for the remainder of the contracts must be delivered. We act as the delivery agent for all contracts, ensuring timely delivery by the seller of the exact quality and quantity specified in a contract and full and timely payment by the buyer.

In order to administer its system of financial safeguards efficiently, our clearing house has developed banking relationships with a network of major U.S. banks and banking industry infrastructure providers, such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. Among the key services provided to our clearing house by these banks and service providers are a variety of custody, credit and payment services that support the substantial financial commitments and processes backing the guarantee of our clearing house to market participants.

Investment Services. In order to achieve collateral efficiencies for our clearing firms, we have also established our Interest Earning Facility, or IEF, program, which allows participating clearing firms to pool their funds and have the funds managed by third party investment managers, to allow clearing firms to enhance the yields they receive on their performance bond collateral deposited with our clearing house. The first IEFs were organized in 1997 as two limited liability companies. Interest earned, net of expenses, is passed on to participating clearing firms. The principal of the first IEFs is guaranteed by us. The investment portfolio of these facilities is managed by two of the exchange’s approved settlement banks, and eligible investments include U.S. Treasury bills and notes, U.S. Treasury strips and reverse repurchase agreements. The maximum average portfolio maturity is 90 days, and the maximum maturity for an individual security is 13 months. We believe that the market risk exposure relating to our guarantee of the principal is not material to the financial statements taken as a whole. In 2002, IEF2 was organized. IEF2 offers clearing firms the opportunity to invest cash performance bonds in shares of approved money market mutual funds. Dividends earned on these shares, net of fees, are solely for the account of the clearing firm on whose behalf the shares were purchased. The principal of IEF2 is not guaranteed by us. In 2003, IEF3 was launched. IEF3 is a specialized collateral program that utilizes various services and methods of processing that are most typically associated with tri-party repossession. Unlike the IEF and IEF2 programs, our IEF3 program does

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not employ an interest rate component. This program is simply a mechanism that allows clearing firms to pledge a wider range of collateral than we have typically accepted. As of December 31, 2003, clearing firms had more than $14.3 billion in balances in IEF, IEF2 and IEF3 funds, compared to $12.2 billion at December 31, 2002. Our clearing house earns fee income in return for providing these value-added services to our clearing firms.

Our clearing house launched a securities lending program in 2001 using a portion of certain securities deposited to meet the proprietary performance bond requirements of our clearing firms. Under this securities lending program, we lend a security to a third party and receive collateral in the form of cash. The majority of the cash is then invested on an overnight basis to generate interest income. The related interest expense represents payment to the borrower of the security for the cash collateral retained during the duration of the lending transaction. Securities on loan are marked-to-market daily and compared to collateral received. The securities lending activity utilizes some of the securities deposited by clearing firms.

Technology

Our operation of both trading facilities and a clearing house has influenced the design and implementation of the technologies that support our operations.

Trading Technology. We have a proven track record of operating successful open outcry and electronic markets by developing and integrating multiple, evolving technologies that support a growing and substantial trading volume. The integrated suite of technologies we employ to accomplish this has been designed to support a significant expansion of our current business and provides us with an opportunity to leverage our technology base into new markets, products and services.

As electronic trading activity expands, we continue to provide greater match engine functionality unique to various markets, market models and product types. We have adopted a modular approach to technology development and engineered an integrated set of solutions that support multiple specialized markets. We continually monitor and upgrade our capacity requirements. Our goal is to design our systems to handle at least twice our peak transactions in our highest volume products. Significant investments in production planning, quality assurance and certification processes have enhanced our ability to expedite the delivery of the system enhancements that we develop for our customers.

Speed, reliability, scalability, capacity and functionality are critical performance criteria for electronic trading platforms. A substantial portion of our operating budget is dedicated to system design, development and operations in order to achieve high levels of overall system performance. For example, to respond to customer requests and bring down the cost of trading for our European customers, we established a telecommunications hub in London in early 2002. In 2004, we plan to add telecommunications hubs in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Gibraltar, Milan and Paris. In late September 2002, we also launched a remote data center to provide additional system capacity and redundancy for our trading and clearing technology. The remote data center features an entirely new network to enhance data base and order routing servers and to improve overall system performance and functionality. Our data centers support our customer interfaces, trading and execution systems, as well as clearing and settlement operations.

The technology systems supporting our trading operations can be divided into four major categories:

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The GLOBEX electronic trading platform includes distribution, order routing, order management and trade matching technology. The modularity and functionality of GLOBEX enable us to selectively add products with unique trading characteristics onto the trading platform with minimal additional investment.

The distribution technologies we offer differentiate our platform and bring liquidity and trading volume to our execution facilities. As of December 31, 2003, nearly 1,100 customers connected directly with us, and thousands more connected with us through 22 independent software vendors and data centers, as well as 34 clearing firms that have interfaces with our systems. Many of these customers connect through a dedicated private frame-relay network that is readily available, has wide distribution and provides fast connections in the Americas, Europe and Asia. We have initiated efforts to provide additional access choices to customers. In early 2001, we implemented a Web-based, virtual private network solution, GLOBEX Trader-Internet, for our lower-volume customers. This added a low-cost alternative that was the first of its kind among major exchanges. Approximately 251 customers currently use GLOBEX Trader-Internet.

In order routing and management, we offer a range of mechanisms and were among the first U.S. derivatives exchanges to fully implement the FIX 4.2 protocol—the standard order routing protocol used within the securities industry. In addition, our order routing and order management systems are capable of supporting multiple electronic trading match engines. This functionality gives us great latitude in the types of markets that we choose to serve.

Several key technology platforms and standards are used to support these activities, including fault-tolerant Tandem systems, IBM mainframes, Sun Microsystems servers, HP and Dell PCs, Oracle and DB2 databases, Unix, Windows NT, Novell, Unicenter TNG software systems, TIBCO middleware and multi-vendor frame relay and virtual private network solutions.

Our match engine is based upon the computerized trading and match software known as the NSC system. We have a long-term license from Euronext-Paris, under which we have the ability to modify and upgrade the performance of the basic NSC system to optimize its performance to suit our needs. We have a fully trained development team that maintains, upgrades and customizes our version of the NSC system. For example, despite a large increase in trading volume, we reduced the average customer response time from 0.23 seconds at the beginning of 2003 to 0.17 seconds at year-end, allowing trades to be executed more quickly and consistently. The customized enhancements that we have developed address the unique trading demands of each marketplace that we serve. We continue to focus on performance features of the match engine and presently have multiple enhancements under development.

Clearing Technology. CLEARING 21, our clearing and settlement software, and SPAN, our margining and risk management software, form the core of our clearing technology.

CLEARING 21 is a system for high-volume, high-capacity clearing and settlement of exchange-based transactions that we developed jointly with NYMEX. The system offers clearing firms improved efficiency and reduced costs. CLEARING 21’s modular design gives us the ability to rapidly introduce new products. The software can be customized to meet the unique needs of specialized markets.

SPAN is our sophisticated margining and risk management software. SPAN has now been adopted by 46 exchanges and clearing organizations worldwide. This software simulates the effects of changing market conditions on a complex portfolio and uses standard options pricing models to determine a portfolio’s overall risk. SPAN then generates a performance bond requirement that typically covers 95% of price changes within a given historical period.

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Strategic Relationships

CBOT. In April 2003, we entered into an agreement with CBOT to provide clearing and related services for CBOT futures and options on futures contracts. We began providing clearing services for CBOT’s agricultural, equity index and a subset of CBOT’s interest rate products on November 24, 2003 and, as of January 2, 2004, we began clearing all of CBOT’s remaining products. In providing services to CBOT, our clearing house clears, settles and guarantees all CBOT transactions, using the full resources of our clearing processes and financial safeguards package. We cleared 9.5 million contracts for CBOT in 2003. Open interest for CBOT contracts cleared by us was 2.7 million contracts at December 31, 2003.

Tokyo Stock Exchange. In October 2000, we signed a non-binding letter of intent to pursue a global alliance with the Tokyo Stock Exchange, with the goal of further developing our respective fixed-income and equity derivatives markets. In March 2002, we introduced S&P/TOPIX 150 stock index futures on our electronic GLOBEX platform during the hours they are not available on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

New York Mercantile Exchange. We entered into an agreement in 2002 with NYMEX to introduce small-sized versions of key NYMEX energy futures contracts for trading on our GLOBEX electronic trading platform. The products, based on our successful E-mini stock index contracts, are called e-miNY energy futures and clear at the NYMEX clearing house. On June 17, 2002, e-miNY crude oil and natural gas futures contracts began trading. As part of the agreement, we now offer a cross-margining program, creating capital efficiencies for market professionals and proprietary accounts by calculating performance bond requirements based on specified positions in both markets. In addition, GLOBEX terminals are available to NYMEX market participants on the NYMEX trading floor, and other market participants are able to connect to GLOBEX through a variety of access channels. During the term of the agreement and for one year thereafter, we are generally prohibited, other than in cooperation with NYMEX, from providing for or facilitating electronic trading in futures or options on futures contracts on any underlying commodity (or index of such commodities) that is also the underlying commodity for a product listed for trading by NYMEX.

Korea Futures Exchange. In October 2002, we signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the Korea Futures Exchange to pursue joint business development initiatives in derivatives products.

Singapore Derivatives Exchange Ltd. In 1984, we entered into a MOS agreement with the Singapore Derivatives Exchange and, in November 2003, we entered into an extension of the MOS agreement. This relationship allows a clearing firm of either exchange initiating trades in certain products on either exchange to execute after-hours trades at the other exchange in those products, then transfer them back to the originating exchange.

Shanghai Futures Exchange. In March 2003, we entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Shanghai Futures Exchange, or SHFE, to pursue joint business development initiatives in derivatives products. The agreement is the first of its kind between SHFE and a North American exchange.

Marketing Programs and Advertising

Our marketing programs primarily target institutional customers and, to a lesser extent, individual traders. Our marketing programs for institutional customers aim to inform traders, portfolio managers, corporate treasurers and other market professionals about novel uses of our products, such as new hedging and risk management strategies. We also strive to educate these users about changes in product design, performance bond requirements and new clearing services. We participate in major domestic and international trade shows and seminars regarding futures and options on futures and other derivatives products. In addition, we sponsor educational workshops and marketing events designed to educate market users about our products. Through these relationships and programs, we attempt to understand the needs of our customer base and use information provided by them to drive our product development efforts.

Our advertising strategies seek to increase awareness and perceptions of us among our institutional and retail customers, as well as support an increase in our trading volume. Our primary method of advertising has been through print media, utilizing trade magazines and newsletters as well as daily business publications. However, we also use on-line, television sponsorship and some out-of-home media to reach our audiences.

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Competition

Until the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, futures trading was generally required to take place on or subject to the rules of a federally designated contract market. The costs and difficulty of obtaining contract market designation, complying with applicable regulatory requirements, establishing efficient execution facilities and liquidity pools and attracting customers created significant barriers to entry. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act has eroded the historical dominance by the exchanges of futures trading in the United States by, among other things, permitting private transactions in most futures contracts and similar products and authorizing the use of electronic trading systems to conduct both private and public futures transactions. For a more detailed description of the regulation of our industry and the regulatory changes brought on by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, see the section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K entitled “Item 1. Business—Regulatory Matters.”

These changing market dynamics have led to increasing competition in all aspects of our business and from a number of different domestic and international sources of varied size, business objectives and resources. We now face competition from other futures, securities and securities option exchanges; OTC markets and clearing organizations; consortia formed by our members and large market participants; alternative trade execution facilities; technology firms, including market data distributors and electronic trading system developers; and other competitors.

At year-end 2003, there were 52 futures exchanges located in 27 countries, including 7 futures exchanges in the United States. On February 8, 2004, Eurex commenced operation of its U.S. derivatives exchange, U.S. Futures Exchange, L.L.C., or Eurex U.S. Eurex U.S.’s initial competitive efforts are directed at CBOT, but we anticipate that it may begin trading our products in the near future. In January 2004, Euronext.liffe announced that it would begin listing and trading Eurodollar futures contracts as early as March 2004. Additionally, because equity futures contracts are alternatives to underlying stocks and a variety of equity option and other contracts provide an alternative means of obtaining exposure to the equity markets, we also compete with securities and options exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange and CBOE, dealer markets such as NASDAQ and alternative trading systems.

OTC markets for foreign exchange and fixed-income derivatives products also compete with us. The largest foreign exchange markets are operated primarily as electronic trading systems. Two of the largest of these, operated by Electronic Broking Services and Reuters plc, serve primarily professional foreign exchange trading firms. Additional electronic platforms designed to serve corporate foreign exchange users are beginning to emerge. Two of these are operated by consortia of interdealer and interbank market participants. A third is a proprietary trading system. These systems present significant potential competitive challenges to the growth of our foreign exchange futures markets.

The OTC fixed-income derivatives market is by far the largest fixed-income derivatives marketplace. The OTC market consists primarily of interbank and interdealer market participants. There is currently no single liquidity pool in the OTC fixed-income derivatives market that is comparable to our Eurodollar markets. The OTC market for fixed-income derivatives products has traditionally been limited to more customized products, and the large credit exposures created in this market and the absence of clearing facilities have limited participation to the most creditworthy institutional participants. However, the size of this market and technology-driven developments in electronic trading and clearing facilities, as well as regulatory changes implemented by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, increase the likelihood that one or more substantial liquidity pools will emerge in the future in the OTC fixed-income derivatives market.

Alternative trade execution facilities that currently specialize in the trading of equity securities have electronic trade execution and routing systems that also can be used to trade products that compete with our products. While these firms generally may lack overall market liquidity and distribution capability, typically, they have advanced electronic and Internet technology, significant capitalization and competitive pricing. In addition, while there is currently relatively little electronic trading of OTC equity derivatives and the greatest portion of this market is conducted through privately negotiated transactions, it is likely that one or more OTC equity derivatives markets will emerge in the future.

Technology companies, market data and information vendors and front-end software vendors also represent potential competitors because, as purveyors of market data, these firms typically have substantial distribution capabilities. As technology firms, they also have access to trading engines that can be connected to their data and information networks. Additionally, technology and software firms that develop trading systems, hardware and networks that are otherwise outside of the financial services industry may be attracted to enter our markets.

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We also face a threat of trading volume loss if a significant number of our traditional participants decide to trade futures or similar products among themselves without using any exchange or specific trading system. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act allows nearly all of our largest customers to transact futures or similar products directly with each other. While those transactions raise liquidity and credit concerns, they may be attractive based on execution costs, flexibility of terms, negotiability of margin or collateral deposits, or other considerations. Additionally, changes under the Commodity Futures Modernization Act permitting the establishment of stand-alone clearing facilities for futures and OTC derivatives transactions will facilitate the mitigation of credit-risk concentrations arising from such transactions.

We believe competition in the derivatives and securities businesses is based on a number of factors, including, among others:

We believe that we compete favorably with respect to these factors, and that our deep, liquid markets; breadth of product offerings; rate and quality of new product development; and efficient, secure settlement, clearing and support services distinguish us from our competitors. We believe that in order to maintain our competitive position, we must continue to develop new and innovative products; enhance our technology infrastructure, including its reliability; and maintain liquidity and low transaction costs.

We expect competition in our businesses to intensify as potential competitors expand into our markets, particularly as a result of technological advances and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and other changes introduced by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, that have reduced the regulatory requirements for the development and entry of products and markets that are competitive with our own. Additional factors that may intensify competition in the future include: an increase in the number of for-profit exchanges; the consolidation of our customer base or intermediary base; an increased acceptance of electronic trading and electronic order routing by our customer base; and the increasing ease and falling cost of other exchanges leveraging their technology investment and electronic distribution to enter new markets and list the products of other exchanges.

In addition to the competition we face in our derivatives business, we face a number of competitors in our transaction processing and other business services, including:

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We believe competition in the transaction processing and business services market is based on, among other things, the cost of the services provided, quality and reliability of the services, timely delivery of the services, reputation and value of linking with existing products, markets and distribution.

Regulatory Matters

The Commodity Exchange Act, the scope of which was significantly expanded in 1974, subjected us to comprehensive regulation by the CFTC. Under the 1974 amendments, the CFTC was granted exclusive jurisdiction over futures contracts (and options on such contracts and on commodities). Such contracts were generally required to be traded on regulated exchanges known as contract markets. The Commodity Exchange Act placed our business in a heavily regulated environment but imposed significant barriers to unregulated competition.

Between 1974 and December 2000, the barriers against unregulated competitors were eroded. The Commodity Exchange Act’s exchange trading requirement was modified by CFTC regulations and interpretations to permit privately negotiated swap contracts meeting specified requirements to be transacted in the OTC market. At June 30, 2003, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements, the total estimated notional amount of outstanding OTC derivatives contracts was nearly $170 trillion compared to approximately $38 trillion for exchange-traded futures and options on futures contracts. The CFTC exemption and interpretations under which the OTC derivatives market operated precluded the OTC market from using exchange-like electronic transaction systems and clearing facilities.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which became effective on December 21, 2000, significantly altered the regulatory landscape and may have important competitive consequences. This legislation greatly expanded the freedom of regulated markets, like ours, to innovate and respond to competition. It also permits us to offer a previously prohibited set of products—single stock futures and futures on narrow-based indexes of securities. The provisions that permit us to trade these security futures products require a novel sharing of jurisdiction between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. Exchange trading of these security futures products is subject to more burdensome regulation than our other futures products. For example, in order to trade these products, we are required to “notice register” with the SEC as a special purpose national securities exchange solely for the purpose of trading security futures products, and the SEC is authorized to review some of our rules relating to these security futures products. Our members trading those products are subject to registration requirements and duties and obligations to customers under the securities laws that do not pertain to their other futures business.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act excluded or exempted many of the activities of our non-exchange competitors from regulation under the Commodity Exchange Act. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act created broad exclusions and exemptions from the Commodity Exchange Act that permit derivatives contracts, which may serve the same or similar functions as the contracts we offer, to be sold in the largely unregulated OTC market, including through electronic trading facilities.

Additionally, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act permits SEC-regulated and bank clearing organizations to clear a broad array of derivatives products in addition to the products that such clearing organizations have traditionally cleared. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act also permits banks and broker-dealers, and some of their affiliates, to offer and sell foreign exchange futures to retail customers without being subject to regulation under the Commodity Exchange Act.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act created a new flexible regulatory framework for us in our capacity as a CFTC registrant, and eliminated many prescriptive requirements of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC in favor of more flexible core principles. For instance, CFTC-regulated exchanges may now list new contracts and adopt new rules without prior CFTC approval under self-certification procedures, permitting more timely product launch and modification.

For regulated markets, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act creates a new three-tiered regulatory structure. The degree of regulation is related to the characteristics of the product and the type of customer that has direct or indirect access to the market, with retail customer markets being subject to greater regulation. The new three-tiered regulatory structure is as follows:

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Our existing market, which trades a broad range of products and permits intermediaries to represent unsophisticated customers, is subject to the most thorough oversight as a designated contract market. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act permits us to organize markets that are subject to lesser regulation depending on the types of products traded and the types of traders. Markets can be organized that trade only products that are unlikely to be susceptible to manipulation and permit direct trading only among institutional participants in order to achieve a less intrusive degree of oversight.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act also provides for regulation of derivatives clearing organizations, or DCOs, like our clearing house, separately from the exchanges for which they clear contracts and permits DCOs to clear a range of OTC-traded products in addition to products traded on an exchange. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act requires a DCO that clears for a registered futures exchange to register with the CFTC. However, our clearing house was deemed to be registered by reason of its activities prior to enactment of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. A DCO may accept for clearing any new contract or may adopt any new rule or rule amendment by providing to the CFTC a written certification that the new contract, rule or rule amendment complies with the Commodity Exchange Act. Alternatively, the DCO may request that the CFTC grant prior approval to any contract, rule or rule amendment, and the CFTC must grant approval within 75 days unless the CFTC finds that the proposed contract, rule, or rule amendment would violate the Commodity Exchange Act.

From time to time it is proposed in Congress that federal financial markets regulators should be consolidated, including a possible merger between the CFTC and the SEC. While those proposals have not been adopted to date, the perceived convergence of product lines offered on the securities and commodity exchanges could make adoption more likely. To the extent the regulatory environment following such consolidation is less beneficial for us, our business, financial condition and operating results could be negatively affected.

From time to time it is proposed in the President’s budget that a transaction tax be imposed on futures and options on futures transactions. While those proposals have not been adopted to date, except for a per-contract fee on single stock futures and futures on narrow-based stock indexes, the imposition of any such tax could increase the cost of using our products and, consequently, our business, financial condition and operating results could be negatively affected.

Our Members

As a result of our conversion into a for-profit corporation in the fall of 2000, individuals and entities who, at the time, were members and owned trading rights on our exchange became the owners of all of the outstanding equity of CME. In our reorganization into a holding company structure, CME shareholders exchanged their shares for shares of CME Holdings. CME shareholders that were members and owned trading rights on our exchange retained them after the merger. Owners of trading rights on our exchange owned, of record, approximately 69% of our outstanding Class A common stock as of December 31, 2003. CME members can execute trades for their own accounts, the clearing firm accounts of other members or for the accounts of customers of clearing firms. Members who trade for their own account, including those who lease trading rights, qualify for lower transaction fees in recognition of the market liquidity that their trading activity provides. These members also benefit from market information advantages that may accrue from their proximity to activity on the trading floors. Generally, member customers are charged lower fees than our non-member customers. In 2003, our members were responsible for nearly 80% of our total trading volume. There are four divisions of membership at our exchange: the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, or CME, division; the International Monetary Market, or IMM, division; the Index and Option Market, or IOM, division; and the Growth and Emerging Markets, or GEM, division. Each membership division has different trading rights. Membership applicants planning to access the trading floor are subject to a review and approval process prior to becoming members and obtaining trading rights. We also have individual trading members and clearing firms.

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Membership in our exchange entitles members to appear on the floor of the exchange during business hours and act as a floor broker and/or floor trader executing trades in the appropriate contracts that correlate with their membership division. Applicants for membership on our exchange are required to be of good moral character, reputation and business integrity. They must also have adequate financial resources and credit to assume the responsibilities and privileges of membership. All members must understand the rules and regulations of our exchange and agree to abide by them. Additionally, they must comply with the provisions of the Commodity Exchange Act and the rules and regulations issued by the CFTC.

Our exchange is a self-regulatory organization subject to the oversight of the CFTC. Members submit to the jurisdiction of our exchange rules. Our Market Regulation department is the investigative and enforcement arm of our exchange with regard to our exchange rules. Members who are found to have violated a rule can be subject to sanctions such as fines, trading suspensions and/or expulsion from our exchange. Changes to our rules must be approved by our Board of Directors. Some rule changes are subject to CFTC approval prior to their implementation. In addition, members receive prior notice of a new rule or amendment before it becomes effective through various publications.

Under the terms of our certificate of incorporation, our members, as Class B shareholders, have the ability to protect their rights to trade on our exchange by means of special approval rights over changes to the operation of our markets and are entitled to elect six of the 20 directors on our Board. In particular, our certificate of incorporation grants the holders of our Class B common stock the right to approve any changes to the trading floor rights, access rights and privileges that a member has, the number of memberships in each membership class and the related number of authorized shares in each class of Class B common stock and the eligibility requirements to exercise trading rights or privileges. Class B shareholders must approve any changes to these special rights.

Our Shareholder Relations and Membership Services Department maintains an auction market for individual trading rights and for trading rights bundled with their associated restricted Class A-1, A-2, A-3 and A-4 shares. Prospective purchasers sign and file with the department a “Bid to Purchase” form which must be guaranteed by either a clearing firm or accompanied by a certified or cashier’s check. Prospective sellers sign and file with the department an “Offer to Sell” form. The department posts bids, offers and last trade prices for purchase of trading rights and for trading rights bundled with their associated restricted Class A-1, A-2, A-3 and A-4 shares. The department then matches the highest bid to buy with the lowest offer to sell.

Other Business Relationships and Subsidiaries

GFX Corporation. GFX Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of CME, was established in 1997 for the purpose of maintaining and creating liquidity in our foreign exchange futures contracts. GFX expanded its business model in 2002 to allow for the trading of interest rate products. GFX accounted for 1.3%, 0.7%, and 1.0% of our consolidated net revenues in 2003, 2002 and 2001, respectively. Experienced foreign exchange and interest rate traders employed by GFX buy and sell our foreign exchange and interest rate futures contracts using our GLOBEX system. They limit risk from these transactions through offsetting transactions using futures contracts and spot foreign exchange transactions with approved counterparties in the interbank market.

CME Trust. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange Trust, or the CME Trust, was established in 1969 to provide financial assistance, on a discretionary basis, to customers of any clearing firm that becomes insolvent. We funded the CME Trust through tax-deductible contributions until June 1996. The CME Trust had approximately $59.4 million, $57.7 million, and $55.4 million in net assets as of December 31, 2003, 2002 and 2001, respectively, as a result of contributions, investment income and the absence of any distributions. Trustees of the CME Trust, who are also members of our Board of Directors, have discretion to use the CME Trust to satisfy customer losses in the event a clearing firm fails to or is in such severe financial condition that it cannot meet a customer’s obligations, provided that the customer’s losses are related to transactions in our contracts. No outside parties, including CME, have any residual interest in the assets of the CME Trust.

Licensing Agreements

Standard & Poor’s. We have had a licensing arrangement with Standard & Poor’s Corporation since 1980. In 1997, all of our previous licensing agreements with Standard & Poor’s were consolidated into one agreement that terminates on December 31, 2013 and includes a clause to negotiate potential extensions in good faith. Under the terms of the agreement, S&P granted us a license to use certain S&P stock indexes and the related trade names, trademarks and service marks in connection with the creation, marketing,

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trading, clearing and promoting of futures and/or options on futures contracts that are indexed to certain S&P stock indexes. The license is exclusive until December 31, 2008 for S&P stock indexes licensed to us and listed by us prior to September 24, 1997. For contracts granted before September 24, 1997 but not listed before September 24, 1997, the licenses are exclusive for one year with possible extensions, and, once listed, the license will be exclusive upon meeting a certain minimum average trading volume or payment of a fee by us. For contracts granted and listed after September 24, 1997, and upon which we have listed indexed contracts for trading within one year of the grant date, the licenses are exclusive for two years after listing, after which they may be made exclusive for the remainder of the term of the agreement upon meeting a certain minimum average trading volume or payment of a fee by us. These licenses become non-exclusive in the event we and S&P do not agree on an extension or we list certain competitive contracts. We have a right of first refusal for stock indexes not licensed under the license agreement as of September 24, 1997 and that are developed solely by S&P before and during the term of the license agreement. We pay S&P a per trade fee and have made certain lump sum payments in accordance with the terms of our agreement. If S&P discontinues compilation and publication of any license or index, we may license, on a non-exclusive and royalty-free basis, the information regarding the list of companies, shares outstanding and divisors for that index or terminate the obligations regarding the index.

NASDAQ. We have had a licensing arrangement with The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. since 1996 to license the NASDAQ-100 Index and related trade names, trademarks and service marks. The license was extended and expanded in October 2003, to license us both the NASDAQ-100 Index and the NASDAQ Composite Index for trading futures and options on futures contracts that are based on the indexes. The license for these indexes is exclusive through October 9, 2007 with an automatic renewal until October 9, 2011. With respect to the NASDAQ Composite Index, as of October 27, 2005 and on each subsequent anniversary, Nasdaq may terminate the exclusivity or the entire license if trading volume fails to meet certain performance criteria. During the applicable period of exclusivity, Nasdaq will not grant a license to use the indexes in connection with the trading, marketing and promotion of futures contracts and options on those futures contracts that are based on an index that is exclusive to us. We pay per trade fees to Nasdaq under the license. We have a right of first refusal for new Nasdaq indexes that are licensed for futures products where the index is substantially equivalent to an index licensed to us or is a subset of an index licensed to us.

NSC. Our license agreement for the NSC software was signed with Paris Bourse ^SBF SA in 1997, and it continues until 2022. The agreement was assigned by Paris Bourse ^SBF SA to Euronext N.V. in 1997. Under the terms of the agreement, Euronext N.V. granted us a nonexclusive license to use the NSC software for the trading of our products and the products of certain other exchanges. The agreement also allows us to specify modifications and enhancements to the NSC software prior to delivery to be made by Paris Bourse ^SBF SA. In addition, we have the right to use our GLOBEX trademark in conjunction with our operation of the electronic trading system based on NSC software. In consideration for the license of the NSC software, we granted Euronext N.V. a license to use and modify CLEARING 21. In December 2002, we acquired the right to offer application service provider services to third parties using the NSC software.

Intellectual Property

We regard substantial elements of our brand name, marketing elements and logos, products, market data, software and technology as proprietary. We attempt to protect these elements by relying on trademark, service mark, copyright and trade secret laws, restrictions on disclosure and other methods. For example, with respect to trademarks, we have registered marks in more than 20 countries. We have filed patent applications to protect our technology. Our rights to stock indexes for our futures products principally derive from license agreements that we have obtained from Standard & Poor’s and the Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. For a more detailed discussion of these licenses, see the section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K entitled “Item 1. Business—Licensing Agreements.”

We regularly review our intellectual property to identify property that should be protected, the extent of current protection for that property and the availability of additional protection. We believe our various trademarks and service marks have been registered or applied for where needed. We also seek to protect our software and databases as trade secrets and under copyright law. We have copyright registrations for certain of our software, user manuals, and databases. Recent legal developments allowing patent protection for methods of doing business hold the possibility of additional protection, which we are examining.

Patents of third parties may have an important bearing on our ability to offer certain of our products and services. It is possible that, from time to time, we may face claims of infringement that could interfere with our ability to use technology or other intellectual property that is material to our business.

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Employees

As of December 31, 2003, we had 1,221 employees. We consider relations with our employees to be good. We have never experienced a work stoppage. We are not a party to any collective bargaining agreement. However, we employ eight engineers who are associated with the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 399, AFL-CIO.

Available Information

Our Web site is www.cme.com . Information made available on our Web site does not constitute part of this document. We make available on our Web site our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to those reports as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file or furnish such materials to the SEC. Our corporate governance materials, including our Corporate Governance Principles, Conflict of Interest Policy, Board of Directors Code of Ethics, Independence Standards, Employee Code of Business Conduct and the charters for all the standing committees of our Board, may also be found on our Web site. Copies of these materials are also available to shareholders upon written request to Shareholder Relations and Membership Services, Attention Ms. Beth Hausoul, Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc., 20 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60606.

Certain Factors that May Affect Our Business

In addition to the other information contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, the following risk factors should be considered carefully in evaluating us and our business.

Our shareholders who are members and own trading rights on our exchange, and who may have interests that differ from or conflict with those of shareholders who are not also members, currently own more than a majority of our voting stock. Shareholders who own trading rights on our exchange account for 15 of the 20 directors on our Board and currently have the ability to control the election of all directors. Our dependence on the trading and clearing activities of our members, combined with their ability to control the election of directors, enables them to exert substantial influence over the operation of our business.

As of December 31, 2003, we estimated that our shareholders who own trading rights on our exchange together owned, of record, shares representing approximately 69% of our outstanding Class A common stock. As a result, they will, if voting in the same manner, control all matters submitted to our shareholders for approval, including electing directors and approving changes of control. As of December 31, 2003, 15 of the 20 directors on our Board owned or were officers or directors of others who own memberships on our exchange. In addition, we are dependent on the revenues from the trading and clearing activities of our members. This dependence also gives them substantial influence over how we operate our business.

Many of our trading members and clearing firms derive a substantial portion of their income from their trading or clearing activities on or through our exchange. In addition, trading rights on our exchange have substantial independent value. The amount of income that members derive from their trading, brokering and clearing activities and the value of their trading rights are, in part, dependent on the fees they are charged to trade, broker, clear and access our markets and the rules and structure of our markets. Our trading members, many of whom act as floor brokers and floor traders, benefit from trading rules, membership privileges and fee discounts that enhance their open outcry trading opportunities and profits. Our predominantly electronic trading members benefit from fee discounts and transaction fee caps that enhance their electronic trading opportunities and profits. Our clearing firms benefit from all of the foregoing, as well as decisions that increase electronic trading, which over time will reduce their costs of doing business on our exchange. As a result, holders of our Class A common stock may not have the same economic interests as our members. In addition, our members may have differing interests among themselves depending on the role they serve in our markets, their method of trading and the products they trade. Consequently, members may advocate that we enhance and protect their clearing and trading opportunities and the value of their trading privileges over their economic interest in us represented by Class A common stock they own.

The share ownership of our members, in combination with their Board representation rights and charter provision protections described in the immediately following risk factor, could be used to influence how our business is changed or developed, including how we address competition and how we seek to grow our volume and revenue and enhance shareholder value.

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Our certificate of incorporation grants special rights to holders of Class B common stock, which protect their trading rights and give them special Board representation, and requires that we maintain open outcry trading until volumes are not significant.

Under the terms of our certificate of incorporation, our Class B shareholders have the ability to protect their rights to trade on our exchange by means of special approval rights over changes to the operation of our markets. In particular, these provisions include a grant to the holders of our Class B common stock of the right to approve any changes to:

Our Class B shareholders are also entitled to elect six of the 20 directors on our Board even if their Class A share ownership interest is very small.

Our certificate of incorporation also includes a provision requiring us to maintain open outcry floor trading on our exchange for a particular traded product as long as the open outcry market is “liquid.” Our certificate of incorporation requires us to maintain a facility for conducting business, disseminating price information, clearing and delivery and to provide reasonable financial support for technology, marketing and research for open outcry markets. Our certificate of incorporation provides specific tests as to whether an open outcry market will be deemed liquid, as measured on a quarterly basis. If a market is deemed illiquid as a result of a failure to meet any of these tests, our Board will determine whether or not that market will be closed.

Our business is subject to the impact of domestic and international market and economic conditions, many of which are beyond our control and could significantly reduce our trading volumes and make our financial results more volatile.

We generate revenues primarily from our trade execution services, clearing services and market data and information services. We expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Each of these revenue sources is substantially dependent on the trading volume in our markets. Our trading volume is directly affected by U.S. domestic and international factors that are beyond our control, including:

Any one or more of these factors may contribute to reduced activity in our markets. Our operating results and trading volume tend to increase during periods of global and domestic economic and geopolitical uncertainty. This is because our customers seek to hedge or manage the risks associated with volatility in the U.S. equity markets, fluctuations in interest rates and price changes in the foreign exchange and commodities markets. The future economic environment will be subject to periodic downturns, including possible recession and lower volatility in financial markets, and may not be as favorable as it has been in recent years. As a result, period-to-period comparisons of our financial results are not necessarily meaningful. Trends less favorable than those of recent periods could result in decreased trading volume, decreased capital formation and a more difficult business environment for us. Material decreases in trading volume would have a material adverse effect on our financial condition and operating results.

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Our operating results are subject to significant fluctuations due to seasonality and a number of other factors. As a result, you will not be able to rely on our operating results in any particular period as an indication of our future performance.

A number of factors beyond our control may contribute to substantial fluctuations in our operating results—particularly in our quarterly results. In the three years prior to 2001, we experienced relatively higher volume during the first and second quarters, and we generally expect that the third and fourth quarters will have lower trading volume. This trend was not evident in 2001 or 2002, except for the fourth quarter of 2002, in part because of the volatility of interest rates and U.S. equities in the third quarter in each of those years. As a result of seasonality and the factors described in the preceding risk factors, you will not be able to rely on our operating results in any particular period as an indication of our future performance. If we fail to meet securities analysts’ expectations regarding our operating performance, the price of our Class A common stock could decline substantially.

Our cost structure is largely fixed. If we are unable to reduce our costs if our revenues decline, our profitability will be adversely affected.

Our cost structure is largely fixed. We base our cost structure on historical and expected levels of demand for our products and services. If demand for our products and services and our resulting revenues decline, we may not be able to adjust our cost structure on a timely basis. In that event, our profitability will be adversely affected.

The global trend toward electronic trading may divert volume away from our open outcry trading facilities. Our revenues, profits and stock price will be adversely affected if we experience reductions in our open outcry trading volume that are not offset by increases in our electronic trading volume.

Both newly formed organizations and established exchanges are increasingly employing trading systems that provide fast, low-cost execution of trades by matching buyers and sellers electronically. These organizations are attracting order flow away from some traditional open outcry trading markets. Many market participants believe that these electronic trading systems represent a threat to the continued viability of the open outcry method of trading. Some major European and Asian futures exchanges have closed their traditional open outcry trading facilities and replaced them entirely with electronic systems. Although we offer an electronic trading system, in 2003 approximately 44% of our revenues from clearing and transaction fees are generated by open outcry trading. Reductions in our open outcry trading volume that are not offset by increases in our electronic trading volume would have a material adverse effect on our revenue, earnings and stock price.

The success of our markets will depend on our ability to complete development of and successfully implement electronic marketplaces that have the functionality, performance, reliability, speed and liquidity required by customers.

The future success of our business depends in large part on our ability to create interactive electronic marketplaces in a wide range of derivatives products that have the required functionality, performance, reliability, speed and liquidity to attract and retain customers. A significant portion of our current overall volume is generated through electronic trading of our E-mini S&P 500 and E-mini NASDAQ-100 products. However, during 2003, approximately 54% of our volume and approximately 44% of our clearing and transaction fee revenues were generated through our open outcry trading facilities. Most of that open outcry volume is related to trading in Eurodollar contracts. Our electronic functionality may not be capable of accommodating all of the complex trading strategies typically used for trading our Eurodollar contracts. We have implemented electronic system upgrades and have acquired technology-related assets and intellectual property of Liquidity Direct to incorporate additional technology into our GLOBEX electronic platform. In addition, we are developing additional functionality to accommodate more Eurodollar trading strategies. We may not complete the development of or successfully implement the required electronic functionality for our Eurodollar marketplace, including the integration and operation of the technology-related assets and intellectual property of Liquidity Direct. Moreover, our Eurodollar customers may not accept our electronic trading systems. In either event, our ability to increase our electronic Eurodollar trading volume would be adversely affected. In addition, if we are unable to develop our electronic trading systems to include other products and markets, or if our electronic marketplaces do not have the required functionality, performance, reliability, speed and liquidity, we may not be able to compete successfully in a new environment that we expect to be increasingly dominated by electronic trading.

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We maintain the simultaneous operation of open outcry trading and electronic trade execution facilities, which may, over time, prove to be inefficient and costly and ultimately adversely affect our profitability.

Currently, we maintain both open outcry trade execution facilities and electronic trade execution facilities. For some products, we maintain side-by-side trading facilities for both open outcry and electronic trading. We are obligated, through the inclusion of provisions in our certificate of incorporation, to maintain the operation of our open outcry trading facilities until the trading volumes in them are not significant. If we continue to operate both trading facilities for the same product, liquidity of markets on each may be less than the liquidity of competing markets on a unified trading platform. In addition, it may be expensive to continue operating two trading systems for the same product. We may incur substantial expenses and experience delays because of our efforts to create trading links between the separate trading platforms to facilitate trading on both systems. Any loss of efficiency or increase in time to market of new or improved products could be detrimental to our business. In addition, we may expend resources on the maintenance of our open outcry facilities that could be more efficiently used to develop our capacity and reduce our costs in the increasingly competitive market for electronic trading facilities.

The development of our electronic trading facilities exposes us to risks inherent in operating in the new and evolving market for electronic transaction services. If we do not successfully develop our electronic trading facilities, or if our customers do not accept them, our revenues, profits and stock price will be adversely affected.

We must further develop our electronic trading facilities to remain competitive. As a result, we will continue to be subject to risks, expenses and uncertainties encountered in the rapidly evolving market for electronic transaction services. These risks include our failure or inability to:

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If we do not successfully develop our electronic trading facilities, or our current or potential customers do not accept them, our revenues, profits and stock price will be adversely affected.

If we are not able to keep up with rapid technological changes, our business will be materially harmed.

To remain competitive, we must continue to improve the responsiveness, functionality, accessibility and other features of our software, network distribution systems and technologies. The markets in which we compete are characterized by rapidly changing technology, changes in customer demand and uses of our products and services, frequent product and service introductions embodying new technologies and the emergence of new industry standards and practices that could render our existing technology and systems obsolete. Our future success will depend in part on our ability to anticipate and adapt to technological advancements and changing standards in a timely, cost-efficient and competitive manner. We cannot assure you that we will successfully implement new technologies or adapt our technology to customer and competitive requirements or emerging industry standards.

We face intense competition from other companies, including some of our members. If we are not able to successfully compete, our business will not survive.

The derivatives, securities and financial services industries are highly competitive. We expect that competition will intensify in the future. Our current and prospective competitors, both domestically and around the world, are numerous. They include securities and securities option exchanges, futures exchanges, OTC markets, clearing organizations, market data and information vendors, electronic communications networks, crossing systems and similar entities, consortia of large customers, consortia of some of our clearing firms and electronic brokerage and dealing facilities. At December 31, 2003, there were 52 futures exchanges located in 27 countries, including 7 futures exchanges in the United States. On February 8, 2004, Eurex commenced operation of its U.S. derivatives exchange, Eurex U.S. Eurex U.S.’s initial competitive efforts are directed at CBOT, but we anticipate that it may begin trading our products in the near future. In January 2004, Euronext.liffe announced that it would begin listing and trading our Eurodollar future contracts as early as March 2004.

We believe we may also face competition from large computer software companies and media and technology companies. The number of businesses providing Internet-related financial services is rapidly growing. Other companies have entered into or are forming joint ventures or consortia to provide services similar to those provided by us. Others may become competitive with us through acquisitions. Recent changes in federal law allow institutions that have been major participants on our exchange to trade the same or similar products among themselves without utilizing any exchange or trading system. Many of our competitors and potential competitors have greater financial, marketing, technological and personnel resources than we do. These factors may enable them to develop similar products, to provide lower transaction costs and better execution to their customers and to carry out their business strategies more quickly and efficiently than we can. In addition, our competitors may:

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If our products, markets and services are not competitive, our business, financial condition and operating results will be materially harmed. In addition, even if new entrants do not significantly erode our market share, we may be required to reduce our fees significantly to remain competitive, which could have a material adverse effect on our profitability.

The enactment of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act will increase competition and enable many of our customers to trade futures contracts other than on exchanges. These events could result in lower trading volume, revenue and profits.

Our industry has been subject to several fundamental regulatory changes, including changes in the statute under which we have operated since 1974. The Commodity Exchange Act generally required all futures contracts to be executed on an exchange that has been approved by the CFTC. The exchange trading requirement was modified by CFTC regulations and interpretations to permit privately negotiated swap contracts to be transacted in the OTC market. The CFTC exemption under which the OTC derivatives market operated precluded the OTC market from using exchange-like electronic transaction systems and clearing facilities. These barriers to competition from the OTC market were largely repealed by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. It is possible that the chief beneficiaries of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act will be OTC dealers and competitors that operate or intend to open electronic trading facilities or to conduct their futures business directly among themselves on a bilateral basis. The customers who may access these trading facilities or engage in bilateral private transactions are the same customers who account for a substantial portion of our trading volume. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act also permits banks, broker-dealers and some of their affiliates to engage in foreign exchange futures transactions for or with retail customers without being subject to regulation under the Commodity Exchange Act.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act also permits bank clearing organizations and clearing organizations regulated by the SEC to clear a broad array of derivatives products in addition to the products that these clearing organizations have traditionally cleared. This allocation of jurisdiction may be advantageous to competing clearing organizations and result in a lower volume of trading cleared through our clearing house.

Our members may seek alternative trading venues and products and negatively impact the liquidity of our markets and our trading volume.

The trading activities of our members accounted for nearly 80% of our trading volume during 2003. When we became a for-profit company, we changed the role of our members in the operation of our business. We eliminated many member-dominated committees or converted them into advisory bodies. We gave our professional staff greater decision-making responsibilities. Subject to the oversight of our Board of Directors, our management is charged with making decisions that are designed to enhance shareholder value, which may lead to decisions or outcomes with which our members disagree. These changes may make us less attractive to our members and encourage them to conduct their business at, or seek membership in, another exchange or to trade in equivalent products among themselves on a private, bilateral basis. A material decrease in member trading activity would negatively impact liquidity and trading volume in our products and reduce our revenues. A loss or material reduction in the number of our clearing firms and the capital they provide to guarantee their trades and the trades of their customers would also diminish the strength and attractiveness of our clearing house and our markets.

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Despite our governance changes, our dependence on our members gives them substantial influence over how we operate our business. Members could use their ownership of Class A and Class B common stock, and ability to elect our Board of Directors, to change or modify our policies or business practices with which they do not agree.

Our trading volume, and consequently our revenues and profits, would be adversely affected if we are unable to retain our current customers or attract new customers to our exchange.

The success of our business depends, in part, on our ability to maintain and increase our trading volume. To do so, we must maintain and expand our product offerings, our customer base and our trade execution alternatives. Our success also depends on our ability to offer competitive prices and services in an increasingly price sensitive business. In addition, our success depends on our ability to increase the base of individual customers who trade our products. We cannot assure you that we will be able to continue to expand our product lines, or that we will be able to retain our current customers or attract new customers. We also cannot assure you that we will not lose customers to low-cost competitors with comparable or superior products, services or trade execution facilities. If we fail to expand our product offerings or execution facilities, or lose a substantial number of our current customers, or are unable to attract new customers, our business will be adversely affected.

Any significant decline in the trading volume of our Eurodollar, S&P 500 or NASDAQ-100 futures and options on futures contracts or in privately negotiated foreign exchange transactions using our clearing house would adversely affect our revenues and profitability.

We are substantially dependent on trading volume from three product offerings for a significant portion of our clearing and transaction fee revenues and profits. The clearing and transaction fee revenues attributable to transactions in our Eurodollar contracts, all our contracts based on the S&P 500 and NASDAQ-100, including our E-mini products, and privately negotiated foreign exchange transactions using our clearing house were approximately 36%, 35%, 12% and 8%, respectively, of our total clearing and transaction fee revenues during 2003 and approximately 40%, 32%, 13% and 7%, respectively, during 2002. Any significant decline in our trading volume in any of these products would negatively impact our business, financial condition and operating results.

We believe our Eurodollar product serves as a global financial benchmark, but we cannot assure you that, in the future, other products will not become preferred alternatives to the Eurodollar contract as a means of managing or speculating on interest rate risk. We also cannot assure you that competitors will not enter the Eurodollar market. For example, in January 2004, Euronext.liffe announced that would it would begin listing and trading Eurodollar futures contracts as early as March 2004. Our members may also elect to trade Eurodollars in privately negotiated bilateral transactions without the use of our clearing house. In either of these events, our trading volume, revenues and profitability could be adversely affected.

Our rights to the Standard & Poor’s and NASDAQ products were obtained through licensing arrangements. Our license agreement with Standard & Poor’s provides that the S&P 500 Index futures products will be exclusive until December 31, 2008 and non-exclusive from December 31, 2008 until December 31, 2013.

In October 2003, we extended and expanded our license agreement with The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. to license both the NASDAQ-100 Index and the NASDAQ Composite Index to us for trading futures and options on futures contracts that are based on the indexes. Our license with Nasdaq is exclusive with respect to futures and options on futures contracts based on the NASDAQ-100 Index through October 9, 2007 with an automatic renewal until October 9, 2011.

We cannot assure you that either of our Standard & Poor’s or Nasdaq license agreements will be renewed when they terminate. In addition, we cannot assure you that others will not succeed in creating stock index futures based on information similar to that which we have obtained by license or that market participants will not increasingly use alternative instruments, including securities and options based on the S&P and NASDAQ indexes, to manage or speculate on U.S. stock risks. We also cannot assure you that

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Nasdaq will not directly or indirectly through other exchanges offer security futures contracts that compete with our broad-based index futures contracts based upon NASDAQ indexes. Currently, NQLX, LLC offers futures contracts based on an exchange-traded fund called QQQ, which may compete with our NASDAQ-100 futures contracts. Any of these events could have an adverse effect on our trading volume, revenues and profits.

Our clearing house operations expose us to substantial credit risk of third parties. Our financial condition will be adversely affected in the event of a significant default.

Our clearing house acts as the counterparty to all trades consummated on or through our exchange and for CBOT futures and options on futures. As a result, we are exposed to significant credit risk of third parties, including our clearing firms. We are also exposed, indirectly, to the credit risk of customers of our clearing firms. These parties may default on their obligations due to bankruptcy, lack of liquidity, operational failure or other reasons. A substantial part of our working capital is at risk if a clearing firm defaults on its obligations to our clearing house and its margin and security deposits are insufficient to meet its obligations. Although we have policies and procedures to help assure that our clearing firms can satisfy their obligations, these policies and procedures may not succeed in detecting problems or preventing defaults. We also have in place various measures intended to enable us to cover any default and maintain liquidity. However, we cannot assure you that these measures will be sufficient to protect us from a default or that we will not be materially and adversely affected in the event of a significant default.

We may not realize the anticipated benefits of our agreement to provide clearing and related services for CBOT products.

In April 2003, we entered into an agreement with CBOT to provide clearing and related services for CBOT futures and options on futures contracts. Under the terms of the agreement, clearing services for commodity, equity and some interest rate products began in November 2003 and for all other CBOT futures and options on futures contracts on January 2, 2004. The initial term of the agreement is four years, with three year renewals upon the mutual consent of the parties. Under the terms of the agreement, CBOT will pay us a fee for the clearing services we provide. This fee will vary based on transaction volume but is guaranteed to be at least $4.5 million per quarter. Pursuant to the agreement, CBOT reimbursed us $2.0 million in initial development costs. CBOT will also reimburse us for the ongoing costs associated with the telecommunications equipment and services that are necessary for us to provide clearing services.

Our anticipated net revenues and net income from providing these clearing services will be dependent on CBOT’s ability to maintain and/or expand its trading volume, which is subject to a number of factors beyond CBOT’s control. As a futures exchange, CBOT’s ability to maintain or expand its volume and operate its business is subject to the same types of risks to which we are subject. For example, on February 8, 2004, Eurex launched a registered U.S. derivatives exchange, Eurex U.S., which initially offers, among other products, contracts on U.S. Treasury notes and bonds in direct competition with contracts currently traded at CBOT. Our net income from the clearing services we provide to CBOT will also depend on our ability to control our costs associated with providing the clearing services.

Our agreement with CBOT provides that both we and CBOT may terminate the agreement in some circumstances. We cannot assure you that the agreement will not be terminated prior to the end of its term or that we will be able to realize the anticipated benefits of our clearing agreement with CBOT. Any such event could have an adverse effect on the price of our Class A common stock.

Our market data fees may be reduced or eliminated by the growth of electronic trading and electronic order entry systems. If we are unable to offset that reduction through terminal usage fees or transaction fees, we will experience a reduction in revenue.

Electronic trading systems do not usually impose separate charges for supplying market data to trading terminals. If we do not separately charge for market data supplied to trading terminals, and trading terminals with access to our markets become widely available, we would lose quote fee revenue from those who have access to trading terminals. We will experience a reduction in our revenues if we are unable to recover that lost quote fee revenue through terminal usage fees or transaction fees.

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If we experience systems failures or capacity constraints, our ability to conduct our operations and execute our business strategy could be materially harmed and we could be subjected to significant costs and liabilities.

We are heavily dependent on the capacity and reliability of the computer and communications systems and software supporting our operations. We receive and/or process a large portion of our trade orders through electronic means, such as through public and private communications networks. Our systems, or those of our third party providers, may fail or operate slowly, causing one or more of the following to occur:

We cannot assure you that we will not experience systems failures from power or telecommunications failure, acts of God, war or terrorism, human error, natural disasters, fire, sabotage, hardware or software malfunctions or defects, computer viruses, acts of vandalism or similar events. If any of our systems do not operate properly or are disabled, including as a result of system failure, customer error or misuse of our systems, we could suffer financial loss, liability to customers, regulatory intervention or reputational damage that could affect demand by current and potential users of our market.

From time to time, we have experienced system errors and failures that have resulted in some customers being unable to connect to our electronic trading platform or erroneous reporting, such as transactions that were not authorized by any customer or reporting of filled orders as cancelled. In September 2002 and May 2003, we experienced hardware failures that resulted in a temporary suspension of trading on our GLOBEX platform. The impact of these events has not been material.

Our status as a CFTC registrant requires that our trade execution and communications systems be able to handle anticipated present and future peak trading volume. Heavy use of our computer systems during peak trading times or at times of unusual market volatility could cause our systems to operate slowly or even to fail for periods of time. We constantly monitor system loads and performance and regularly implement system upgrades to handle estimated increases in trading volume. However, we cannot assure you that our estimates of future trading volume will be accurate or that our systems will always be able to accommodate actual trading volume without failure or degradation of performance. For example, as of December 31, 2003, GLOBEX had achieved 225 days of volume greater than one million contracts, excluding the volume attributable to the first-day trading volumes of TRAKRS. During the initial period of increased GLOBEX trading volume, there were instances of connectivity problems or erroneous reports that affected some users of the platform. System failure or degradation could lead our customers to file formal complaints with industry regulatory organizations, file lawsuits against us or cease doing business with us or could lead the CFTC or other regulators to initiate inquiries or proceedings for failure to comply with applicable laws and regulations.

We will need to continue to upgrade, expand and increase the capacity of our systems as our business grows and we execute our business strategy. Our goal is to design our systems to handle at least twice our peak transactions in our highest volume products. As volumes grow, the ability of our systems to meet this goal on an ongoing basis depends on our ability to increase our system capacity

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on a timely basis while maintaining system reliability. Although many of our systems are designed to accommodate additional volume and products and services without redesign or replacement, we will need to continue to make significant investments in additional hardware and software to accommodate increased volume and to provide transaction processing and business services to third parties. If we cannot increase the capacity and capabilities of our systems to accommodate an increasing volume of transactions and to execute our business strategy, our ability to maintain or expand our businesses would be adversely affected.

Some of our largest clearing firms have indicated their belief that clearing facilities should not be owned or controlled by exchanges and should be operated as utilities and not for profit. These clearing firms are seeking legislative or regulatory changes that would, if adopted, enable them to use alternative clearing services for positions established on our exchange. Even if they are not successful, these factors may cause them to limit or stop the use of our markets.

Some of our largest clearing firms, which are significant customers and intermediaries in our products, have increasingly stressed the importance to them of centralizing clearing of futures contracts and options on futures contracts in order to maximize the efficient use of their capital, exercise greater control over their value at risk and extract greater operating leverage from clearing activities. Many clearing firms have expressed the view that clearing firms should control the governance of clearing houses or that clearing houses should be operated as utilities rather than as for-profit enterprises. Some of these firms, along with the Futures Industry Association, are attempting to cause legislative or regulatory changes to be adopted that would facilitate mechanisms or policies that allow market participants to transfer positions from an exchange-owned clearing house to a clearing house owned and controlled by clearing firms. Our strategic business plan is to operate a vertically integrated transaction execution and clearing and settlement business. If these legislative or regulatory changes are adopted, our strategy and business plan may lead clearing firms to establish, or seek to use, alternative clearing houses for clearing positions established on our exchange. Even if they are not successful in their efforts, the factors described above may cause clearing firms to limit or stop the use of our products and markets. If any of these events occur, our revenues and profits would be adversely affected.

We depend on third party suppliers and service providers for a number of services that are important to our business. An interruption or cessation of an important supply or service by any third party could have a material adverse effect on our business.

We depend on a number of suppliers, such as banking, clearing and settlement organizations, telephone companies, online service providers, data processors, and software and hardware vendors for elements of our trading, clearing and other systems, as well as communications and networking equipment, computer hardware and software and related support and maintenance. We cannot assure you that any of these providers will be able to continue to provide these services in an efficient, cost-effective manner or that they will be able to adequately expand their services to meet our needs. An interruption in or the cessation of an important supply or service by any third party and our inability to make alternative arrangements in a timely manner, or at all, would result in lost revenue and higher costs.

Our networks and those of our third party service providers may be vulnerable to security risks, which could result in wrongful use of our information or cause interruptions in our operations that cause us to lose customers and trading volume and result in significant liabilities. We could also be required to incur significant expense to protect our systems.

We expect the secure transmission of confidential information over public networks to continue to be a critical element of our operations. Our networks and those of our third party service providers, our members and our customers may be vulnerable to unauthorized access, computer viruses and other security problems. Persons who circumvent security measures could wrongfully use our information or cause interruptions or malfunctions in our operations. Any of these events could cause us to lose customers or trading volume. We may be required to expend significant resources to protect against the threat of security breaches or to alleviate problems, including reputational harm and litigation, caused by breaches. Although we intend to continue to implement industry-standard security measures, these measures may prove to be inadequate and result in system failures and delays that could cause us to lose customers, experience lower trading volume and incur significant liabilities.

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We operate in a heavily regulated environment that imposes significant costs and competitive burdens on our business.

Although the Commodity Futures Modernization Act significantly reduced our regulatory burdens, we remain extensively regulated by the CFTC. Our international operations may be subject to similar regulations in specific jurisdictions. We are registered in the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong. In some cases, our registrations are subject to annual review and such reviews may subject us to additional requirements in the future. We may also be required to register or become subject to regulation in other jurisdictions in order to accept business from customers in those jurisdictions.

Many aspects of our operations are subject to oversight and regulation by the CFTC. Our activities relating to single stock and narrow-based stock index futures products will also be subject to oversight by the SEC. Our operations are subject to ongoing review and oversight, including:

If we fail to comply with applicable laws, rules or regulations, we may be subject to censure, fines, cease-and-desist orders, suspension of our business, removal of personnel or other sanctions, including revocation of our designations as a contract market and derivatives clearing organization. Changes in laws, regulations or governmental policies could have a material adverse effect on the way we conduct our business.

The CFTC has broad powers to investigate and enforce compliance and punish non-compliance with its rules and regulations. We cannot assure you that we and/or our directors, officers and employees will be able to fully comply with these rules and regulations. We also cannot assure you that we will not be subject to claims or actions by the CFTC or other agencies.

Demutualization and utilization of electronic trading systems by traders from remote locations will, among other developments, impact our ability to continue the traditional forms of “self-regulation” that have been an integral part of the CFTC regulatory program. The CFTC is reviewing that impact, and it is unclear at this time whether the CFTC will make modifications to its regulations that will have an adverse effect on the way we conduct our business.

From time to time, it is proposed in Congress that federal financial markets regulators should be consolidated, including a possible merger between the CFTC and the SEC. While those proposals have not been adopted to date, the perceived convergence of product lines offered on the securities and commodity exchanges could make adoption more likely. To the extent the regulatory environment following such consolidation is less beneficial for us, our business could be negatively affected.

From time to time, the President’s budget includes a proposal that a transaction tax be imposed on futures and options on futures transactions. While those proposals have not been adopted to date, except for a per-contract fee imposed under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 on single stock futures and futures on narrow-based stock indexes, the imposition of any such tax would increase the cost of using our products and, consequently, could adversely impact our trading volumes, revenues and profits.

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Our compliance and risk management methods might not be effective and may result in outcomes that could adversely affect our reputation, financial condition and operating results.

Generally, the CFTC has broad enforcement powers to censure, fine, issue cease-and-desist orders, prohibit us from engaging in some of our businesses or suspend or revoke our designation as a contract market or the registration of any of our officers or employees who violate applicable laws or regulations. Our ability to comply with applicable laws and rules is largely dependent on our establishment and maintenance of compliance, audit and reporting systems, as well as our ability to attract and retain qualified compliance and other risk management personnel. We face the risk of significant intervention by regulatory authorities, including extensive examination and surveillance activity. In the case of non-compliance or alleged non-compliance with applicable laws or regulations, we could be subject to investigations and judicial or administrative proceedings that may result in substantial penalties or civil lawsuits, including by customers, for damages, which can be significant. Any of these outcomes would adversely affect our reputation, financial condition and operating results. In extreme cases, these outcomes could adversely affect our ability to conduct our business.

Our policies and procedures to identify, monitor and manage our risks may not be fully effective. Some of our risk management methods depend upon evaluation of information regarding markets, customers or other matters that are publicly available or otherwise accessible by us. That information may not in all cases be accurate, complete, up-to-date or properly evaluated. Management of operational, legal and regulatory risk requires, among other things, policies and procedures to record properly and verify a large number of transactions and events. We cannot assure you that our policies and procedures will always be effective or that we will always be successful in monitoring or evaluating the risks to which we are or may be exposed.

As a financial services provider, we are subject to significant litigation risk and potential securities law liability.

Many aspects of our business involve substantial liability risks. While we enjoy governmental immunity for some of our market-related activities, we could be exposed to substantial liability under federal and state laws and court decisions, as well as rules and regulations promulgated by the SEC and the CFTC. These risks include, among others, potential liability from disputes over terms of a trade, the claim that a system failure or delay caused monetary losses to a customer, that we entered into an unauthorized transaction or that we provided materially false or misleading statements in connection with a transaction. Dissatisfied customers frequently make claims regarding quality of trade execution, improperly settled trades, mismanagement or even fraud against their service providers. We may become subject to these claims as the result of failures or malfunctions of our systems and services we provide. We could incur significant legal expenses defending claims, even those without merit. In addition, an adverse resolution of any future lawsuit or claim against us could have a material adverse effect on our business.

We could be harmed by employee misconduct or errors that are difficult to detect and deter.

There have been a number of highly publicized cases involving fraud or other misconduct by employees of financial services firms in recent years. Misconduct by our employees, including employees of GFX Corporation, our wholly owned subsidiary that engages in proprietary trading in foreign exchange and Eurodollar futures, could include hiding unauthorized activities from us, improper or unauthorized activities on behalf of customers or improper use of confidential information. Employee misconduct could subject us to financial losses or regulatory sanctions and seriously harm our reputation. It is not always possible to deter employee misconduct, and the precautions we take to prevent and detect this activity may not be effective in all cases. Our employees also may commit errors that could subject us to financial claims for negligence, or otherwise, as well as regulatory actions.

Our acquisition, investment and alliance strategy involves risks. If we are unable to effectively manage these risks, our business will be materially harmed.

To achieve our strategic objectives, in the future we may seek to acquire or invest in other companies, businesses or technologies. Acquisitions entail numerous risks, including the following:

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We may not be able to integrate successfully any operations, personnel, services or products that we have acquired or may acquire in the future.

We also may seek to expand or enhance some of our operations by forming joint ventures or alliances with various strategic partners throughout the world. Entering into joint ventures and alliances also entails risks, including difficulties in developing and expanding the business of newly formed joint ventures, exercising influence over the activities of joint ventures in which we do not have a controlling interest, and potential conflicts with our joint venture or alliance partners. For example, in 2001 we entered into an operating agreement governing OneChicago, our joint venture with CBOE and CBOT, to trade single stock futures and futures based on narrow-based stock indexes. Under the terms of our operating agreement, we own approximately a 40% interest in the joint venture, CBOE owns approximately a 40% interest and CBOT and management of OneChicago each own a minority interest. Our ability to control key decisions relating to the operation and development of OneChicago will be limited. In addition, under the terms of our operating agreement, until May 31, 2005, we are restricted from in any way engaging in the business of trading, marketing, regulating, selling, purchasing, clearing or settling transactions in single stock futures other than in conjunction with the joint venture. This restriction on our ability to compete applies whether or not we remain part of the joint venture, but it does not apply to futures based on narrow-based stock indexes. In 2002, we entered into an agreement with NYMEX to introduce e-miNY energy futures contracts, which trade on our GLOBEX electronic trading platform and clear at the NYMEX clearing house. During the term of the agreement and for one year thereafter, we are generally prohibited, other than in cooperation with NYMEX, from providing for or facilitating electronic trading in futures or options on futures contracts on any underlying commodity (or index of commodities) that is also the underlying commodity for a product listed for trading by NYMEX. We cannot assure you that any joint venture or alliance that we have entered into or may enter into in the future will be successful.

Our ability to successfully trade single stock futures and futures on narrow-based stock indexes may be impaired by statutory and regulatory provisions that limit our natural competitive advantages and expand opportunities for competitors.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which authorized us to trade futures contracts based on individual securities and narrow-based stock indexes, or security futures, prohibited the implementation in connection with these contracts of many traditional features of futures trading that would have made using security futures cheaper, tax advantaged and more efficient than using similar security options and OTC security derivatives. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act also created a system of dual registration and regulation for security futures intermediaries and exchanges that may be costly and burdensome to the intermediaries and the exchanges and may discourage intermediaries and investors from using security futures. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act also eliminated most legal impediments to unregulated trading of security futures or similar products between qualified investors. In addition, foreign exchanges may be allowed to trade similar products under terms that will be more favorable than the terms we are permitted to offer our customers. Finally, security futures are subject to a number of complicated and controversial regulations. As a result, we cannot assure you that we, either directly or through our joint venture, OneChicago, will be successful in offering single stock futures or futures on narrow-based stock indexes.

The imposition in the future of regulations requiring that clearing houses establish linkages with other clearing houses whereby positions at one clearing house can be transferred to and maintained at, or otherwise offset by a fungible position existing at, another clearing house may have a material adverse effect on the operation of our business.

In connection with the trading of single stock futures and futures on narrow-based stock indexes, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act contemplates that clearing houses will, after an initial period, establish linkages enabling a position in any such product executed on an exchange for which it clears these products to be offset by an economically linked or fungible position on the opposite side of the market that is executed on another exchange utilizing a different clearing house. If, in the future, a similar

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requirement is imposed with respect to futures contracts generally, the resulting unbundling of trade execution and clearing services would have a material adverse effect on our revenues and profits.

Expansion of our operations internationally involves special challenges that we may not be able to meet, which could adversely affect our financial results.

We plan to continue to expand our operations internationally, including by directly placing order entry terminals with members and/or customers outside the United States and by relying on distribution systems established by our current and future strategic alliance partners. We face certain risks inherent in doing business in international markets, particularly in the regulated derivatives exchange business. These risks include:

In addition, we will be required to comply with the laws and regulations of foreign governmental and regulatory authorities of each country in which we conduct business. These may include laws, rules and regulations relating to any aspect of the derivatives business. To date, we have had limited experience in marketing and operating our products and services internationally. We cannot assure you that we will be able to succeed in marketing our products and services in international markets. We may also experience difficulty in managing our international operations because of, among other things, competitive conditions overseas, management of foreign exchange risk, established domestic markets, language and cultural differences and economic or political instability. Any of these factors could have a material adverse effect on the success of our international operations and, consequently, on our business, financial condition and operating results.

We may not be able to protect our intellectual property rights, which may materially harm our business.

We rely primarily on trade secret, copyright, service mark, trademark and patent law and contractual protections to protect our proprietary technology and other proprietary rights. We have filed several patent applications covering our technology in the United States and certain other jurisdictions. Notwithstanding the precautions we take to protect our intellectual property rights, it is possible that third parties may copy or otherwise obtain and use our proprietary technology without authorization or otherwise infringe on our rights. We also seek to protect our software and databases as trade secrets and under copyright law. We have copyright registrations for certain of our software, user manuals and databases. The copyright protection afforded to databases, however, is fairly limited. While the arrangement and selection of data generally are protectable, the actual data may not be, and others may be free to create databases that would perform the same function. In some cases, including a number of our most important products, there may be no effective legal recourse against duplication by competitors. In addition, in the future, we may have to rely on litigation to enforce our intellectual property rights, protect our trade secrets, determine the validity and scope of the proprietary rights of others or defend against claims of infringement or invalidity. Any such litigation, whether successful or unsuccessful, could result in substantial costs to us and diversions of our resources, either of which could adversely affect our business.

Any infringement by us on patent rights of others could result in litigation and adversely affect our ability to continue to provide, or increase the cost of providing, electronic execution services.

Patents of third parties may have an important bearing on our ability to offer certain of our products and services. Our competitors as well as other companies and individuals may obtain, and may be expected to obtain in the future, patents related to the types of products and services we offer or plan to offer. We cannot assure you that we are or will be aware of all patents containing claims that may pose a risk of infringement by our products and services. In addition, some patent applications in the United States are confidential until a patent is issued and, therefore, we cannot evaluate the extent to which our products and services may be

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covered or asserted to be covered by claims contained in pending patent applications. In general, if one or more of our products or services were to infringe patents held by others, we may be required to stop developing or marketing the products or services, to obtain licenses to develop and market the services from the holders of the patents or to redesign the products or services in such a way as to avoid infringing on the patent claims. We cannot assess the extent to which we may be required in the future to obtain licenses with respect to patents held by others, whether such licenses would be available or, if available, whether we would be able to obtain such licenses on commercially reasonable terms. If we were unable to obtain such licenses, we may not be able to redesign our products or services to avoid infringement, which could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and operating results.

We only recently began operating as a for-profit company and have a limited operating history as a for-profit company. Accordingly, our historical and recent financial and business results may not be representative of what they may be in the future .

We have only operated as a for-profit company with private ownership interests since November 13, 2000. We have a limited operating history as a for-profit business on which you can evaluate our management decisions, business strategy and financial results. As a result, our historical and recent financial and business results may not be representative of what they may be in the future. We are subject to risks, uncertainties, expenses and difficulties associated with changing and implementing our business strategy that are not typically encountered by established for-profit companies. The major U.S. futures exchanges have operated historically as mutual, membership organizations. There is little history or experience in operating an exchange as a for-profit corporation upon which we can draw. As a not-for-profit company, our business strategy and fee structure were designed to provide profit opportunities for our members. We targeted profit levels that provided sufficient levels of working capital. Today, our for-profit initiatives are designed to increase our revenues, make us profitable, optimize volume and liquidity and create operating efficiencies. These initiatives may not yield the benefits or efficiencies we expect. For example, fee increases, volume and member discounts and new access rules to our markets may not separately result in higher revenues and profits or greater volume or liquidity in our markets. As a result, we may not be able to operate effectively as a for-profit corporation. It is possible that we may incur significant operating losses in the future and that we may not be able to achieve or sustain long-term profitability.

As a holding company, we are totally dependent on dividends from our operating subsidiary to pay dividends and other obligations.

We are a holding company with no business operations. Our only significant asset is the outstanding capital stock of our subsidiary. As a result, we must rely on payments from our subsidiary to meet our obligations. In 2003, we paid regular quarterly dividends of $0.14, $0.14, $0.14 and $0.21 per share to our Class A and Class B shareholders. As of September 3, 2003, our annual dividend target was increased from 20% of the prior year’s cash earnings to 30% of the prior year’s cash earnings. On February 5, 2004, we declared a quarterly dividend of $0.26 per share to the Class A and Class B shareholders. We currently expect that the earnings and cash flow of our subsidiary will primarily be retained and used by it in its operations, including servicing any debt obligations it may have now or in the future. Accordingly, our subsidiary may not be able to generate sufficient cash flow to pay a dividend or distribute funds to us in order to allow us to pay a dividend on or make a distribution in respect of our Class A common stock. Our existing credit facility, as well as future credit facilities, other future debt obligations and statutory provisions, may limit our ability to pay dividends.