According to a report on BusinessWeek's website, CME Group, the world's largest futures market, is interested in buying the business that owns the Dow Jones-branded stock and commodity indexes for as much as $700 million.
CME Group, which resulted from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's (CME) merger with the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), currently trades financial derivatives based on Dow Jones indexes, including the well-known Dow Jones Industrial Average. The contracts originally launched on the pre-merger CBOT and competed with the CME's own S&P 500-based contracts.
Buying the Dow Jones index business would enable CME Group to protect is license to trade derivatives based on the benchmarks. The exchange's current license expires in 2014.
