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ProtectAg Futures, INC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in Chicago, IL. We are the agricultural professionals who create the open-outcry markets and trade the electronic platform at the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

We provide market liquidity in times of uncertainty because of our discretion and expertise as specialists in each commodity offered at CBOT and the CME.
We, each of us, personally offset risk every day.

The Battle in Chicago and around the world continues against destructive algorithmic and high speed traders on their path to destroy true price discovery.  Since the merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, the powers in charge have turned their backs on what had built Chicago into the trading center of the world: Transparency, Liquidity, and Price Discovery.

Originally, the intent of allowing computers into commodity trading was to open futures markets to anyone with a desktop computer. But a new landscape in agricultural futures trading has emerged, and the PCs of the farmer are unable to compete with Wall Street computers. Powerful algorithms -algo-traders,- execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of commodities and marketplaces simultaneously. They can spot trends before other participants can blink, changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

Now agricultural futures are a two-tiered marketplace of the algorithmic/ high frequency traders and everyone else. Producers, end-users and individual traders (the real and original market participants) want to know they have a legitimate shot at getting a fair deal. Otherwise, the markets loose their integrity.  

Loopholes in exchange rules give high-speed traders an early glance at other orders in the market place. Their computers can essentially bully slow participants into giving up profits -- and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.  People, not mathematical equations should determine the price of food.