ER2 moving from CME to ICE

ER2 traders will be interested in this press release from ICE:
ICE’s Global Electronic Marketplace to Exclusively Offer Russell 1000, 2000 and 3000 Index Futures

ICE is the IntercontinentalExchange. I'm not sure how they managed to wrestle the ER2 out of the CME's hands as that's not explained in the press release - anybody know?

I believe that the switch-over is going to be in September 2007 so about 3 months time. I've no idea how this is going to work. I'm not sure if there's even a precedence for something like this in history. I have all sorts of questions about comparing the CME's data on the ER2 to that from ICE.

I speculate that the volume on the ER2 will drop unless the migration is seamless. By seamless I mean that even the ticker symbol migrates across the exchanges and all trader's brokers accounts do not need adjusting to trade this.

I initially thought that the CME would replace this with their MC400 contract and push this contract in place of the ER2 although on second thought none of the stocks in the MC400 are in the ER2 so that probably won't work. Not sure what will happen here.

Any opinions? How many of you guys trade the ER2?

Does anyone know what the symbol for Russell 2000 mini on ICE is in Interactive brokers?
It's not listed anywhere

I answered this with mreiserer in personal communications, but for those who want to know, here's how to do it. The symbol is RUT, but after you hit that you see on option for futures under CBOE, and you click on that for the contract you want. Then you have a choice for NYBOT, and you use that one. That gets you to the correct symbol, which is the ICE exchange symbol TF. Kind of crazy, and took me three support calls to finally figure it out, basically myself.

For anybody that's using eSignal the symbol for the E-mini Russell 2000 on ICE is "TF" - so use "TF Z8" for the December 2008 contract.

Thursday 11 Sep 2008 is Rollover and the first day for the new ICE version of the ER2 (now ticker symbol TF) to become the front month. Here is the spec sheet: ICE Russell 2000 Mini Fact Sheet.