In addition to its headquarters in Chicago,[6][7] the company also has offices in New York, Houston, and Washington D.C., in the U.S., as well as abroad in Bangalore, Beijing, Belfast, Calgary, Hong Kong, London, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo.

[26] On December 3, 2012, CME Group acquired the Kansas City Board of Trade, the dominant venue for the sale of hard red winter wheat, for $126 million in cash.

[27][28] On March 15, 2016, the firm announced the sale of its suburban Chicago data center in Aurora, IL to CyrusOne for $130 million, in a leaseback transaction.

[30][31] CME Group operates a global derivatives marketplace that allows institutions and individuals to trade futures and options based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, metals, and agricultural commodities.

[39][40] CME Group's history of member-owned exchanges and mergers and acquisition of rivals have led to an unconventionally large board size for a publicly traded company.

According to a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) 2014 report, a significant cause of the event was the use of spoofing algorithms by Navinder Singh Sarao, a British financial trader; just prior to the flash crash, he placed orders for thousands of E-mini S&P 500 stock index futures contracts — which traded on CME Group's Globex platform — and later replaced or modified those orders at least 19,000 times before they were cancelled.

[43][44] The event led to the modern day implementation of coordinated cross-market circuit breakers, as the CME's Globex platform halted trading in an automated response to the activity, while the New York Stock Exchange did not.