Here's Where Jobs Data Won't Be the Pits
CHICAGO -- Here at the world's biggest futures markets, floor traders are gearing up for a potential summer blockbuster: the government unemployment report.</br></br>For the men and women who earn their living in Chicago's futures pits -- buying and selling contracts based on currencies, interest rates and other instruments -- few indicators can shake up markets more than those in the widely watched report prepared monthly by the Labor Department.</br></br>"It's the big one," says Zenda Sergo, a interest-rate futures trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. "It's the one we've all been waiting for."</br></br>The last time the report was released -- on July 2, just before a long holiday weekend -- futures and options trading surged. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, for example, posted the second-highest daily volume in its history, as traders exchanged about 935,000 contracts, with a total face value of billions of dollars.</br></br>In the Chicago pits, the July 2 report sparked instantaneous rallies in the prices of most financial futures contracts -- contracts such as those based on Treasury bonds, German marks, British pounds and Eurodollars, which are U.S. dollars held in interest-bearing accounts outside the U.S. Not every market rose; prices of futures on the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index slumped when trading in these contracts began an hour later.