From Four Small Exchanges to One Giant Screen
COMEX began in 1933 as a merger of four small New York commodity exchanges, folded into NYMEX in 1994, and became part of CME Group in 2008. Its physical trading floor in lower Manhattan has gone largely quiet over the years as trading migrated to CME's Globex electronic platform — a handful of options pits are about all that remain of the shouting.
Nearly a Full Day, Five Days a Week
Where the LME's Ring runs a tidy five-hour window, COMEX trades almost continuously from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon (US time), pausing only for a short daily maintenance break. That design borrows from modern financial futures markets built for a global trading audience, not a single regional physical floor.
The Paper Price Behind the Spot Price
COMEX gold and silver futures, alongside LBMA's over-the-counter prices, are the two reference points most of the world's "spot" quotes are ultimately built from. Refiners, jewellers, and even LBMA's own benchmark auctions keep one eye on the COMEX screen in real time.
When New York and London Stopped Agreeing
In April 2020, COVID-era refinery shutdowns in Switzerland — which casts most of the world's large 400oz bars — disrupted the usual flow of metal into COMEX-deliverable 100oz and kilo bars. COMEX futures traded at an unusually wide, widely-reported premium over London spot for weeks, a rare visible crack in an otherwise tightly linked global gold price.
Contracts & Products Traded
COMEX's core products are standardized futures — 100-ounce gold (GC), 5,000-ounce silver (SI) and 25,000-pound copper (HG) — plus options on each, and smaller micro contracts sized for retail-scale trading rather than institutional lots. Physical delivery is available against COMEX-approved vaults holding 100-ounce and kilobar gold, but in practice only a small fraction of contracts are ever taken to delivery; most positions are closed out or rolled forward in cash. That gap between enormous paper volume and comparatively thin physical delivery is what distinguishes COMEX from the LME, where delivery is a routine, structurally central part of how the market works.
Role in Global Price Discovery
COMEX gold and silver futures, together with LBMA's over-the-counter prices, are the two pillars nearly every quoted "spot" price in the world is built from — refiners, jewellers and even LBMA's own auctions watch the COMEX screen in real time. COMEX copper has become its own closely tracked signal too, occasionally trading at a marked premium to LME copper when US tariff policy or supply concerns diverge from the global picture, echoing the Shanghai-London spread traders watch on SHFE. In the 24-hour relay, COMEX is the last major leg of the trading day, running through the US afternoon after London closes and into the next Asian morning.
On a heavy trading day, more paper gold changes hands on COMEX in a single afternoon than exists in physical form in most countries' entire national reserves.
Sources
- COMEX founded 1933 by merging four small New York commodity exchanges — What is COMEX? (2024)
- COMEX became part of CME Group in 2008 — CME Group / NYMEX merger completion (2008)
- April 2020 Swiss refinery shutdowns disrupted the COMEX-London gold trade, widened the price spread — Gold bullion shortage sends COMEX premium to 45-year high (2020)
