Investing In Futures Market or Forex Market
Feb0
Future’s trading and market was founded back in the 19th century by the agriculture markets owners. At that point, farmers started selling contracts to supply agricultural products at a later date. This was done to forecast market wishes and stabilise demand and supply during off seasons. The prevailing commodity market includes way more than rural products.
Now, future’s and commodity are an international market for all kinds of commodities including manufactured products, rural products, and monetary instruments like currencies and treasury bonds. A futures contract states what price will be paid for a product at a stated end date. Rather, it’s the futures contract itself that’s traded as the value of that contract changes daily according the stock market price of the commodity. In each futures contract there’s a customer and a seller. The vendor takes the short position and the purchaser takes the long position. The futures contract cites a purchasing price, a quantity and a finish date. As an example : A farmer agrees to supply one thousand bushels of wheat to a baker at a cost of $5.00 a bushel. If the daily cost of wheat futures falls to $4.00 a bushel, the farmer’s account is credited with $1000 ( $5.00 – $4.00 X one thousand bushels ) and the baker’s account is debited by the same quantity. Futures accounts are settled each trading day. At the end of the contract period, the contract is settled. If the cost of wheat futures is still at $4.00 the farmer will have made $1000 on the futures contract and the baker will have lost an identical quantity. Likewise, the farmer must sell his wheat on the market for $4.00 a bushel, less than what he expected when entering the futures contract, but the profit generated by the futures contract makes up the difference. Investors hope to profit by the daily variations in the commodity market by purchasing long ( from the purchaser ) if they are expecting prices to rise or by purchasing short ( from the vendor ) if they anticipate costs to fall. The currency exchange market has one or two benefits over the commodity market.
The Currency exchange is open twenty-four hours per day, five days each week. Most futures exchanges are open seven hours a day. This makes foreign exchange more liquid and permits foreign exchange traders to use trading opportunities as they arise instead of waiting for the market to open. Foreign exchange transactions are commission-free. Brokers earn cash by setting a spread the difference between what a currency can be acquired at and what it can be sold at. Against this, traders must pay a commission or brokerage charge for each futures exchange they enter into. This minimizes slippage and increases price certainty.
Brokers in the commodity market frequently quote costs reflecting the last trade not always the cost of your exchange. Debits in futures are generally a possiblility due to stock market opening and slippage.
Mail this postPopularity: 4% [?]
Futures Options and Spreads
Jul0
Please only use these future option examples for educational purposes.
Paper trade them.
I normally write about spread options. Today I want to first take a look at a futures spread. Let’s look at a natural gas/heating oil spread. This is buying one natural gas futures and selling one heating oil futures.
Below are daily, weekly and monthly charts:
Daily
http://deltaneutraltrading.com/062709.bmp
Weekly
http://deltaneutraltrading.com/062709b.bmp
Monthly
http://deltaneutraltrading.com/062709c.bmp
You can trade this as a spread using options. You do not have to just buy and sell the futures. You can buy a call and buy a put instead so you are limited in your potential loss. Even though futures spreads can have less risk, there is still the possibility of unlimited losses.
With buying options, you are limiting the risks. You no longer have unlimited loss potential. But the problem is that you are buying premium. So instead of just buying options, you can buy and sell credit spreads.
For example, from looking at the above chart, we can buy an at the money natural gas call option and sell a natural gas out of the money call. Then we sell an at the money heating oil call option and buy an out of the money heating oil option. We expect the natural gas futures to rise in comparison to the heating oil futures because of the chart.
I go over these types of option spreads in my course. And I look at some market combinations that you might not have thought of. Don’t just use these for the obvious spread markets like, wheat/corn, t-bond/t-note. There are other market combinations for spreads and other ways to come up with the option spreads. You can create a spread using more than one market instead of just two markets. You can also create option combinations that are not typical credit or debit spreads. Think outside the box with commodities options.
Mail this postPopularity: 15% [?]
