| Sumario: | Despite recent efforts to modernize their facilities, Chicago's two exchanges, the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, can still be inefficient places to do business. The vast majority of customers' orders have to negotiate a bewildering array of middlemen to get to the floor, and although the two Chicago exchanges have wrestled with using computers to pipe orders onto the trading floor, less than 10 percent of orders are carried in this way. In addition, the two exchanges have failed to cooperate sensibly with each other. Furthermore, the brokers and traders themselves have made matters worse: Not all traders are happy with the transparency that automation will bring, and more efficient markets will eventually put more brokers and traders out of work.
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