Gillian Tan, Columnist

China Can Have the Chicago Exchange

It isn't even a close competitor to the biggest U.S. boards.

February 5, 2016 at 7:58 PM UTC

Gillian Tan is a senior reporter covering finance and alternative asset classes including real estate, infrastructure, private equity, private credit, venture capital and sports business. She previously wrote an opinion column for Bloomberg and was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She is a qualified chartered accountant.

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For those up in arms over Friday's news that the Chicago Stock Exchange, a 134-year-old bastion of American capitalism, has agreed to sell itself to a Chinese investor group: Simmer down.

It's literally not that big of a deal, because the exchange is pretty insignificant. It was responsible for exactly 0.47 percent of U.S. equity trading volume during the month of January, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. For context, the main boards of Nasdaq and NYSE saw 33 and 27 times that volume, respectively.