Earnings Preview for CME Group (CME)

CME Group

is on tap to report first-quarter 2011 earnings before the market opens on Thursday, April 28. Analysts are looking for the holding company to announce that per-share earnings rose 13.6% from a year ago to $4.19. The consensus estimate has climbed in the past 60 days from $3.95 per share. Chicago-based CME Group operates the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange and Commodity Exchange. Its customer base includes professional traders, financial institutions, institutional and individual investors, corporations, manufacturers and governments. Its primary trade execution facilities consist of the CME Globex electronic trading platform and open outcry trading floors, as well as privately negotiated transactions that are cleared and settled through its clearing house, CME Clearing. CME Group also has strategic partnerships with exchanges across the globe, as well as a joint venture agreement with Dow Jones & Company. During the first quarter, CME raised its quarterly dividend by 22%, the first time it was raised since 2008. The company also reported that its volume averaged 14.7 million contracts per day in February, a double-digit rise both sequentially and year-over-year. Analysts expect to see revenues of $825.7 million for the first quarter, an increase of 19.1% from the same period of last year. Looking forward, the consensus forecast calls for sequential and year-over-year growth of both revenue and earnings in the second quarter. Analysts have done a pretty fair job of predicting CME's results recently. In the past six quarters, per-share earnings have come within a nickel or so of expectations. The stock has outperformed the broader market in the past few weeks, even though the share price is in the same neighborhood it was three months ago.