On the Friday after Thanksgiving, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) gave global traders a lesson in what is known as "true Black Friday".

On that day, this giant exchange, known as the "heart of global risk management," suddenly went on strike. The Globex system was down for several hours, affecting S&P 500 futures, U.S. Treasuries, crude oil, gold, and even the foreign exchange platform EBS, all paralyzed. The amount of funds involved? Starting from hundreds of billions.

A Singaporean oil trader's reaction is quite representative: staring at the screen, motionless, thinking a colleague was playing a prank. As a result, the next second, he was directly kicked out of the system. By the time he realized what happened, the entire market had already frozen.

The most dramatic is the gold market. After the COMEX futures halted, the bid-ask spread for London spot gold skyrocketed from the usual $1 to over $20—an increase of 20 times. What does this spread mean? If you want to buy or sell gold, the cost suddenly skyrockets 20 times, and the price swings up and down like a roller coaster. Liquidity? Nonexistent.

Some people got anxious and started calling to inquire about prices, or ran to small exchanges to try their luck. But to be honest, that level of liquidity can't compare to CME at all. With an average daily volume of 26 million contracts, when it halts, the entire derivatives market's hedging and pricing functions are basically rendered useless.

The timing is even more critical. This failure occurred during the half-day trading session after Thanksgiving, when the market was already extremely thin. If it had happened on a non-farm payroll day or during a Federal Reserve decision, the consequences would have been unimaginable.

Ironically, at that time the U.S. government was still in a shutdown, economic data was missing, and the market was already in a "blind flight" state. At this critical moment, even the trading infrastructure was failing, and institutions that were supposed to settle at the end of the year must have been on the verge of collapse.

This incident serves as a wake-up call for the entire industry: no matter how powerful a centralized infrastructure is, it can fail at critical moments. The reliability of data centers and emergency plans are not just empty words. After all, if something like this happens again next time, it may not just be a simple price fluctuation.

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