A room of Chicago grain merchants invented the futures contract in 1848
- CME Group still trades more futures than anywhere on Earth
- 7 billion-plus contracts traded in 2025 alone
- One in four US freight trains passes through Chicago
- The Prairie State, Land of Lincoln, 21st to join the Union (1818)
How Illinois’s digital economy grew
Illinois becomes the 21st state
Admitted to the Union on December 3, 1818.
Where the futures contract was invented — and still trades
The Chicago Board of Trade was founded in 1848 by 82 grain merchants; by 1865 it had adopted the standardized rules on margin and delivery that historians credit as the birth of the modern futures contract. A parallel exchange, founded in 1898 and renamed the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1919, launched the world’s first financial futures in 1972, built on a feasibility paper by economist Milton Friedman. The two rivals merged in 2007 to form CME Group, now the world’s largest derivatives exchange, trading more than 7 billion contracts in 2025 alone.
The shouting-trader pits that defined the business for over 150 years are gone — CME closed most open-outcry pits in 2015 and shut the last agricultural pits in 2021, moving entirely to electronic trading. Same institution, same city, a completely different physical form.
America’s freight bottleneck
Chicago has been the nation’s rail hub since the 1860s, sitting at the junction of six Class I railroads and handling roughly a quarter of all US freight trains and about half of all intermodal trains daily — the continent’s main interchange between western and eastern rail networks. A public-private partnership called CREATE has invested roughly $2 billion untangling the resulting freight and passenger rail congestion.
How Illinois businesses buy websites
Chicago’s trading floors and rail yards get the attention, but most of Illinois’s businesses are the trades and shops serving Chicago’s neighborhoods, its suburbs, and the rest of the state well beyond it.
Professional and B2B services
A finance and logistics hub rewards clarity about exactly what you do and who you serve.
Trades and home services
Chicagoland is enormous — be specific about which neighborhoods or suburbs you actually cover.
Shops and hospitality
Clear hours and location, readable on a phone, matter just as much downstate as they do in the city.
How well do you know Illinois’s digital economy?
3 quick questions. Get all 3 right and you win a 10% off discount code. Every answer is somewhere on this page.
Illinois quiz · 1 of 3
In what year was the Chicago Board of Trade founded?
Why FastSites works here
A city that moved from shouting trading pits to electronic markets without missing a beat understands that the fastest, clearest version of something usually wins. A one-page site, live in days, at a published price, is that same instinct for a small business.