Chicago Mercantile Exchange to launch Russell 1000 futures

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) plans to launch its new Russell 1000 futures contracts on April 28. The new stock index futures will trade on the CME's Globex electronic platform virtually 24 hours a day.

The Russell 1000 index is made up of the top 1,000 US-incorporated stocks based on market capitalisation. Futures on the Russell 1000 are sized at $100 times the index price, giving each contract an underlying value of about $45,000.

Futures and options on futures on the Russell 2000 were first traded on the CME in 1993. The exchange then listed e-mini Russell 2000 futures in 2001. Open interest in the latter surpassed 40,000 positions this week.

The Russell 1000 and Russell 2000 indexes are subsets of the Russell 3000 Index. This measures the performance of the 3,000 largest US companies based on total market capitalisation. The index covers approximately 98% of the investable US equity market.

As of the latest reconstitution of the Russell 1000 index, the average market capitalisation was about $11 billion and the median market capitalisation was $3.5 billion. The index had a total market capitalisation range of $1.3 billion to $309 billion.