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February 15, 2007

NEW YORK BOARD OF TRADE

COCOA RETAILER LEARNS ABOUT NEW YORK BOARD OF TRADE

Alison Nelson VIP Cocoa Market Opening
7:40-7:55AM - Ms. Nelson is introduced to NYBOT cocoa traders
7:55AM - Ms. Nelson is formally introduced in Cocoa Ring by NYBOT Official
8AM - Ms. Nelson rings the opening bell of NYBOT’s cocoa market

NEW YORK – For retailers, visits to the trading floor provide an invaluable opportunity to learn about pricing.
Just ask Alison Nelson, the founder of the Chocolate Bar shops, who visited NYBOT on February 15 and gained a velvety-smooth understanding of the relationship between the futures and spot markets.

“We call the distributor and the price is always changing” says her husband, Workhouse Publicity, CEO Adam Nelson.

Now they know why, and the knowledge couldn’t come at a better time.

Last year, Dubai-based United Restaurant Group bought the licensing rights and plans to establish 30 Chocolate Shop locations in the Middle East in the next ten years. Locally, Ms. Nelson opened a store in the summer community of Long Beach Island, New Jersey last year and will open another at famed retailer Henri Bendel’s on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue later in 2007. Ms. Nelson founded her first store in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village four years ago. Her whimsical creations like Elvis, a banana marshmallow and crunchy peanut butter enrobed in dark chocolate, or PBJ, a peanut butter and grape jelly covered in dark chocolate candy, quickly rose to local, cult, cocoa classics status. This was Ms. Nelson’s first visit to the exchange’s trading floor.

New York's Original Future Exchange
The New York Board of Trade (NYBOT), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), provides the world’s premiere futures and options markets for several internationally traded agricultural commodities:  cocoa, coffee, cotton, orange juice and sugar. For well over a century, representatives of these primary commodity industries have joined traders and investors in the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) markets to engage in price discovery, price risk transfer and price dissemination for these products. New York’s original futures exchange also provides futures and options markets for currency cross rates, as well as for the Russell Equity Indexes, NYSE Commodity Index, Reuters Jefferies CRB Index, Continuous Commodity Index (CCI), US Dollar Index (USDX ®) and the FINEX Euro Currency Index, along with new markets for Ethanol and Pulp.
This history began with the founding of the New York Cotton Exchange (NYCE) in 1870 (cotton futures), followed by the Coffee Exchange of the City of New York in 1882 (coffee futures). The Coffee Exchange added sugar futures in 1914 and became the Coffee and Sugar Exchange in 1916. The New York Cocoa Exchange began operations in 1925 and merged with the Coffee and Sugar Exchange in 1979 to form the Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange, Inc. (CSCE). The New York Cotton Exchange (NYCE) began trading Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice futures in 1966. Options on agricultural futures were first added in 1982 (on sugar futures). In 1985 the NYCE began trading currency futures on its FINEX division. In 1994, NYCE opened a trading floor in Dublin for FINEX and added a number of currency cross rate futures contracts.  Stock and commodity index futures also began trading the same year.   The CSCE and NYCE formed the Board of Trade of the City of New York, Inc. as a parent company in 1998, a merger process completed in June 2004 when the two exchanges became the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT). On January 12, 2007, Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), the leading electronic energy marketplace acquired the New York Board of Trade, making NYBOT a wholly-owned subsidiary of ICE and part of a for-profit, publicly traded corporation for the first time in its history. In January 2007, the New York Board of Trade adds electronic trading (NYBOT on ICE) of its benchmark products trading side-by-side with its traditional open outcry markets. September 11, 2001, was a difficult and defining moment for the NYBOT exchanges when the destruction of the World Trade Center forced NYBOT to re-locate to its back up facility in Long Island City and remain there for two years.  In 2003, NYBOT moved into a new state-of-the-art facility in the World Financial Center.  With that return, the New York Board of Trade continued its long history in Lower Manhattan of providing effective risk management tools for major international industries and opportunities for well-informed investors.