Futures contract

In finance, a futures contract (sometimes called futures) is a standardized legal contract to buy or sell something at a predetermined price for delivery at a specified time in the future, between parties not yet known to each other. The item transacted is usually a commodity or financial instrument. The predetermined price of the contract is known as the forward price or delivery price. The specified time in the future when delivery and payment occur is known as the delivery date. Because it derives its value from the value of the underlying asset, a futures contract is a derivative. Futures contracts are widely used for hedging price risk and for speculative trading in commodities, currencies, and financial instruments.

Contracts are traded at futures exchanges, which act as a marketplace between buyers and sellers. The buyer of a contract is said to be the long position holder and the selling party is said to be the short position holder. As both parties risk their counter-party reneging if the price goes against them, the contract may involve both parties lodging as security a margin of the value of the contract with a mutually trusted third party. For example, in gold futures trading, the margin varies between 2% and 20% depending on the volatility of the spot market.

A stock future is a cash-settled futures contract on the value of a particular stock market index. Stock futures are one of the high risk trading instruments in the market. Stock market index futures are also used as indicators to determine market sentiment.

The first futures contracts were negotiated for agricultural commodities, and later futures contracts were negotiated for natural resources such as oil. Financial futures were introduced in 1972, and in recent decades, currency futures, interest rate futures, stock market index futures, and perpetual futures have played an increasingly large role in the overall futures markets. Retail traders increasingly use futures contracts alongside options strategies to hedge positions, manage leverage, and scale entries in volatile markets. Even organ futures have been proposed to increase the supply of transplant organs.

The original use of futures contracts mitigates the risk of price or exchange rate movements by allowing parties to fix prices or rates in advance for future transactions. This could be advantageous when (for example) a party expects to receive payment in foreign currency in the future and wishes to guard against an unfavorable movement of the currency in the interval before payment is received.

However, futures contracts also offer opportunities for speculation in that a trader who predicts that the price of an asset will move in a particular direction can contract to buy or sell it in the future at a price which (if the prediction is correct) will yield a profit. In particular, if the speculator is able to profit, then the underlying commodity that the speculator traded would have been saved during a time of surplus and sold during a time of need, offering the consumers of the commodity a more favorable distribution of commodity over time.

The Dōjima Rice Exchange, first established in 1697 in Osaka, is considered by some to be the first futures exchange market, to meet the needs of samurai who—being paid in rice—needed a stable conversion to coin after a series of bad harvests.

The Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) listed the first-ever standardized 'exchange traded' forward contracts in 1864, which were called futures contracts. This contract was based on grain trading, and started a trend that saw contracts created on a number of different standardized futures contracts based on commodities, as well as a number of futures exchanges set up in countries around the world. By 1875 cotton futures were being traded in Bombay in India and within a few years this had expanded to futures on edible oilseeds complex, raw jute and jute goods and bullion. In the 1930s two thirds of all futures was in wheat.