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R.J. O'Brien Associates, a founding member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that started trading in 1914 as a cash butter and egg specialist, saw a November inflow of customer accounts of almost $800 million, an increase of 31 percent. The gain was nearly five times its monthly average increase of $175 million over the past three years, the analysis found.
Rosenthal Collins Group, founded in 1923 as a grain broker, saw an increase of $362 million or 26 percent, nearly five times its three-year monthly average increase of $75 million.
One other - ADM Investor Services, the broker subsidiary of agribusiness firm Archer Daniels Midland Company - saw a $315 million rise, a more modest 13 percent gain in its funds.
But none of the other FCMs that agreed to take on MF Global accounts saw as large an increase in customer funds as RJO and Rosenthal, Reuters found, and some actually saw declines.
The task of divvying up the accounts fell to the CME Group, the world's biggest futures bourse and MF Global's first-level regulator. Few dispute the Herculean task it undertook to unfreeze trading accounts within a week, but questions over the handling of the process linger.
"I think the entire process should be transparent," said Mark Melin, a Chicago-based futures markets author and investor. "The expectation should be, 'Are they doing honest bidding and are they open to being transparent about how things were handled?'"
While the CME has been blasted over the past three months for its failure to act more quickly to protect customers amid the collapse of one of its most active brokers, its role in doling out customer accounts has been largely unexamined.
