MGEX Membership Prices

A recent sale of a KCBT membership led me to look at some historical comparisons to the MGEX. Last week, a KC seat traded for $390,000--a price about 2.5% below the September 2008 price and 46% below the all-time highs of Dec 2007. MGEX's last sale was 33% below the prices of September 2008 and fully 72% down from the highs (Feb 2008).

To be fair, the MGEX membership price performance is not much worse than the shares of the CME which are about 28% down from September 2008 and 63% down from the highs. ICE shares performed significantly better, at least recently; they are up 20% since September 2008.

So either the MGEX has been relatively poorly run over the past several years or the seats are dang cheap-take your pick.

**PS. My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that the MGEX would have to start paying a dividend of approximately $6,000/membership to "catch up" to the KCBT seat performance. More realistically, a dividend of $4,000 would provide solid support for membership prices and stop the decay in value.