One opportunity for the CBOT to rally the faithful will be Thursday, when it reports fourth-quarter earnings. Analysts are currently calling for a profit of 35 cents a share on sales of $115.7 million. Again, however, the performance of its rival hangs heavy in the air: The CME posted a 37% rise in its fourth-quarter profit, reported last week, and beat analyst estimates handily. The similarities of the CME and CBOT can be likened to that of their New York stock trading counterparts. Both companies have similar fundamentals -- they make money by charging a fee to buy and sell contracts on the market and make additional revenue from market data. Neither really competes with the other in terms of the types of futures contracts they trade. The CME focuses on four different types of derivatives -- interest rates, equities, commodities and currencies -- and it is fairly well diversified among the groups. The CBOT, conversely, is mainly concentrated in interest rate futures and sells some agricultural contracts. Beyond diversification, the CME has access to the more attractive interest rate contract: the short-term interest rate. Because the volatility in the short term interest rate market is far greater than the long-term one, volume in that area is also higher. To add additional volume, the CME offers short-term interest contracts for many countries. Only U.S. Treasury futures are traded on the CBOT. But what the two exchanges do compete for are investor dollars, and of the two neighbors, CME could still be better situated at the start of 2006. It has $1 billion cash on the balance sheet and looks ripe to make an acquisition. Its strategy to attract overseas participants to trade on the exchange is laid out better than the CBOT's, analysts say, and it has the added advantage of having been publicly traded longer, which means it doesn't have many of the distractions that CBOT may have during its first year of public ownership. Meanwhile, analysts see CBOT's main growth potential in its agricultural trading business. "We believe there is tremendous potential for outsized volume growth and operating margin explosion if and when agricultural trading more fully migrates to an electronic platform," Credit Suisse analyst Howard Chen said in a report. Whether that market will be enough to level the playing field is an open question.