interfaces were adopted globally by commodity exchanges using the FIX Protocol. In 2001 the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (later merged into the CME group, the world's largest futures exchange company) launched their FIX-compliant interface. By 2011, the alternative trading system (ATS) of electronic trading featured computers buying and selling without human dealer intermediation. High-frequency trading (HFT) algorithmic trading, had almost phased out "dinosaur floor-traders". Complexity and interconnectedness of global market The robust growth of emerging market economies (EMEs, such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China), beginning in the 1990s, "propelled commodity markets into a supercycle". The size and diversity of commodity markets expanded internationally, and pension funds and sovereign wealth funds started allocating more capital to commodities, in order to diversify into an asset class with less exposure to currency depreciation. In 2012, as emerging-market economies slowed down, commodity prices peaked and started to decline. From 2005 through 2013, energy and metals' real prices remained well above their long-term averages. In 2012, real food prices were their highest since 1982. The price of gold bullion fell dramatically on 12 April 2013 and analysts frantically sought explanations. Rumors spread that the European Central Bank (ECB) would force Cyprus to sell its gold reserves in response to its financial crisis. Major banks such as Goldman Sachs began immediately to short gold bullion. Investors scrambled to liquidate their exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and margin call selling accelerated. George Gero, precious metals commodities expert at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Wealth Management section reported that he had not seen selling of gold bullion as panicked as this in his forty years in commodity markets. The earliest commodity exchange-traded fund (ETFs), such as SPDR Gold Shares and iShares Silver Trust , actually owned the physical commodities. Similar to these are (palladium) and (platinum). However, most Exchange Traded Commodities (ETCs) implement a futures trading strategy. At the time Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that Russia could sink into recession. He argued that "We live in a dynamic, fast-developing world. It is so global and so complex that we sometimes cannot keep up with the changes". Analysts have claimed that Russia's economy is overly dependent on commodities. Contracts in the commodity market A Spot contract is an agreement where delivery and payment either takes place immediately, or with a short lag. Physical trading normally involves a visual inspection and is carried