Wall Street’s main indexes were gearing up for a higher open on Friday as futures resumed trading after an outage at CME Group brought trading in currencies, commodities and equities futures to a standstill around the world.
At 8:42 a.m. ET, Dow E-minis were up 80 points, or 0.17%, S&P 500 E-minis were up 13.25 points, or 0.21% and Nasdaq 100 E-minis were up 81.5 points, or 0.32%.
CME said that all its markets were opened and trading, hours after the world’s largest exchange operator flagged the issue.
The outage was first posted on its website at 9:40 p.m. ET on Thursday and CME said it was due to a cooling issue at its CyrusOne data centers.
CME’s stock futures offerings linked to the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are typically heavily traded before U.S. markets open, with investors relying on them to gauge trends and directions.
“It’s a black eye to the CME and probably an overdue reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected all these are. It’s month end, a lot of things get rebalanced today,” said Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI.
“Having said that, it could have been a lot worse, it’ll be a very low volume day. If you’re going to have it, there would have been worse days to have a breakdown like this.”
Market volumes are expected to be light following the Thanksgiving holiday. Investors instead looked to exchange-traded funds tracking Wall Street’s main indexes as a gauge for broader market mood.
Traders warned of a potential spike in volatility once the outage is resolved, a situation likely to be worsened by low liquidity during the holiday-shortened trading week. Markets will close at 1 p.m. ET.
Shares of CME Group were down about 0.1% in light volumes.
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