Lukewarm Start for New London Gold Futures Contracts

by Ronan Manly, BullionStar:

The second half of 2016 saw announcements by three exchange providers for plans to compete in the London Gold Market through offerings of exchange-traded London gold futures contracts.

First off the mark was the London Metal Exchange (LME) in conjunction with the World Gold Council with a planned platform called LMEprecious. There were rumblings of this initiative in the London financial media from as early as January 2015, but concrete details for the actual platform were only announced on 9 August 2016. See LME press release “World Gold Council, LME and key market participants to launch LMEprecious.” The LME plans to call its gold futures contract LME Gold. There will also be an “LME Silver”. Each is a suite of contracts of varying lengths including a daily futures (spot settlement) contract. See also BullionStar blog “The Charade Continues – London Gold and Silver Markets set for even more paper trading” from August 2016 which took a first look at the LMEprecious suite.

Two months after the LME announcement, during the annual conference of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced on 17 October that it too planned the launch of a gold futures contract in the London market. See Bullion Desk’s “ICE to launch gold futures in 2017, competition in gold market grows” as well as the ICE press release. The ICE contract is named “Gold Daily Futures” and resides on the ICE Futures US platform. It too is a daily futures contract.

Not to be outdone, the CME Group then followed suit on 1 November 2016 and it too announced plans for a “London Spot Gold Futures contract” as well as a “London Spot Silver futures contract”. See CME press release “CME Group Announces New Precious Metals Spot Spread” from 1 November 2016, and “CME to launch London spot gold, silver futures for spot spread” from the Bullion Desk, 1 November 2016. The CME contract was to trade on COMEX (Globex and Clearport) as a daily futures contract, and was devised so as to offer traders a spot spread between COMEX and London OTC Spot gold.

As of August 2016, the LME’s target launch date was said to be “the first half of 2017”. ICE was more specific with a target launch of February 2017 (subject to regulatory review). In it’s announcement, CME went for an even earlier planned launch date of 9 January 2017 (subject to regulatory approval).

Two Launches – No Volume

Why the update? Over the 2 weeks, there have been a number of developments surrounding these 3 contracts. The CME and ICE gold futures contracts have both been launched, and additionally, LME has provided more clarity around the launch date of its offering.

Surprisingly, while there was plenty of financial media coverage of these 3 gold futures contracts when their plans were initially publicised from August – November 2016, there has been little to no financial media coverage of the contracts now that 2 of the 3 have been launched.

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