In a move likened to two rival sports teams playing home games on the same pitch, traders from Chicago's Mercantile Exchange are moving onto the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade on Monday. The marriage of convenience has produced the world's largest and most diverse financial exchange where daily trading averaged 4.5 trillion dollars worth of contracts last year. Rival NYSE Euronext averaged 2.5 trillion dollars worth. Chicago has been a global center for derivatives ever since the CBOT began offering the world's first futures contracts in 1851, based on the likely prices of farming products in the US Midwest. While the merger was welcomed by most traders as the only way to remain competitive as exchanges around the world formed alliances and launched competing products, working in the same room with their arch rival was a bitter pill for some to swallow. For more than a century the exchanges were rival fraternities jostling for status, power and customers. The CBOT was older, better-known and the bastion of the city's South Side Irishmen. The scrappier Merc, founded in 1898, was dominated by traders from the North Side and managed to grow to twice the CBOT's daily volume. Traders drank in different bars. Used different hand signals and lingo in the pits. __
