As firms are aware, CME is currently working to roll out a major new release to our Front-End Clearing (FEC) application, with a target date for launch of mid-April.  The most important benefit this new release will provide is the incorporation of Average Pricing functionality.  The old "APS" application will be retired, and firms will use FEC for all aspects of both standard giveups and average-pricing.

This advisory describes two important changes to the usage of the Order Number field and the Execution ID field, associated with this new release.

Currently, in Front-End Clearing (FEC), the Order Number field is eight bytes long.  For electronic trades in either CME or CBOT products, the full eight bytes may be used.

If an electronic trade is marked for give-up, however, only the right-most four bytes of this value are currently used to define the allocation group.  Consequently, only the right-most four bytes are provided on the give-up transfer transactions generated when an allocation is accepted.

As part of the APS enhancement to FEC, we will stop truncating the order number field when a trade is marked for either give-up or averaging.