Finance History|11 Wall Street — Thirty-Five Dollars for the First Listed American Exchange

People treat CME Group as a Chicago derivatives house that always printed CME on a mature book.

The 2002 issuer was still Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc., four years after the Merc demutualized.

Crain's Chicago Business recorded that the firm priced 4.75 million Class A shares on 5 December 2002 at 35 dollars each, above a 31-to-34-dollar range, with Morgan Stanley leading.

Three million of those shares were primary. Selling members offered 1.75 million more.

Trading on the New York Stock Exchange under CME began on 6 December 2002.

Crain's recorded an 11 percent opening jump to 39 dollars and a first-session close of 42.90 dollars.

The company's 2002 annual report later said the underwriters took the 712,660-share option, bringing the sale to 5,463,730 shares at 35 dollars and net proceeds to the Holdings company of about 117.5 million dollars in 2002 currency.

That report called the listing the first completed initial public offering of a U.S. financial exchange.

The mechanism is a mutual futures market converting seat rights into a listed Class A minority so the firm could raise technology capital and use stock as acquisition currency.

Class B shares and trading rights stayed bundled with membership. The public bought the parent, not a pit seat.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where CME first printed. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.