CHICAGO (AP) — The oldest U.S. futures and options exchange is going Wall Street after 157 years.
The Chicago Board of Trade, founded to do business in corn and soybeans but now predominantly a marketplace for financial futures and options, got a strong reception from investors Tuesday evening to its long-anticipated initial public offering.
Poised for its stock-market debut today, the Board of Trade sold 3.2 million shares priced at $54 a share, according to underwriter Credit Suisse First Boston. That should bring in net proceeds of about $172 million — well above the $147 million it had projected.
The exchange needs the money to improve its trading technology and speed its ongoing embrace of electronic trading in a fast-changing industry.
The Board of Trade, the world's third-largest derivatives exchange behind the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the all-electronic Eurex, said in its registration last month that it anticipated an IPO price of $45 to $49 per share.
It begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange today Wednesday under the symbol BOT.
The holding company, CBOT Holdings Inc., sold 2.9 million shares of common stock at Tuesday's after-market IPO, which was co-underwritten by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and its existing shareholders sold another 263,000 shares. That still left Board of Trade members holding more than 93 percent of the more than 52 million shares outstanding.