1998 –?The start of a global liquidity network

On 28 September 1998, Schweizer B?rse and Deutsche B?rse celebrated the completion of a truly ambitious project. Eurex was the collective name given to the two exchanges Eurex Deutschland (the legal successor to DTB) and Eurex Zurich (the legal successor to SOFFEX) that formed a new joint system. Eurex offered trading and clearing for futures and options on stock indices as well as on capital market instruments and on money-market paper.

The goal was to enable as many trading participants as possible to access the Eurex market through the Eurex network direct from their home base, made possible by a starter kit. Between April and December 1998, interested traders were able to have the requisite hardware delivered to their doorstep complete with pre-installed software. By year-end, there were already 313 Eurex participants from 14 countries.
A tremendous start for the new Eurex Exchange – within its first year, it was already ranked second-largest derivatives exchange in the world.

In 2008, Eurex had evolved into an integral part of the global derivatives market looking back on ten years of successful electronic trading, with trading volumes growing by 24 percent a year on average.

What started on 28 September 1998 with 973,000 transaction daily, each lasting 0.144 seconds on average has now, 20 years later, developed to 89,128,683 daily transactions today, which take 0.000205 seconds on average. That means the number of transactions has increased 100-fold and that they are processed at 700 times the speed.

Eurex 2018 – that is one of the world’s leading derivatives exchange offering a broad range of international benchmark products and operating the most liquid fixed income markets in the world. Innovative and reliable technology provides more than 400 participants and about 7,500 traders in 36 countries worldwide with access to our products and services. We offer a wide choice of equity-based contracts on indexes, single equities, ETFs, dividends and some of the world’s most liquid fixed income derivatives – on one single platform.

20 years of Eurex. 20 years of challenges and solutions, issues and innovations.

Eurex. An exchange for the better.