Futures are a type of derivative contract agreement that obligates parties to buy or sell an asset or security of a specific commodity at a predetermined future date and price. These contracts are traded on futures exchanges such as the CME Group and require an approved brokerage account to trade. Futures are a great way to diversify your portfolio and can provide leverage to increase potential gains. Stock index futures are traded through a futures broker.
A trade with a futures contract can be opened with a buy or sell order. Buy orders result in a long position, which benefits from a rising stock index. Sell orders give you a short position to profit from a downward index. The opening value of a futures trade is the price of the futures contract when the trade is made, and profits or losses are calculated from that value.
When a futures trade is made, the trader must place a margin amount set by the futures exchange. The trader's profit or loss on the trade are added to or subtracted from this margin deposit. An intermarket spread involves betting on long and short positions in two different stock futures in a related market, such as gas and electricity companies, with the same delivery date. The hope is that the loss of one stock future will be the gain of the other stock market future.
Stock futures, also called market futures or stock index futures,
are futures contracts that track a specific benchmark index, such as the S&P 500.The negotiation of institutional programs will attempt to arbitrate futures with the underlying index, also known as cash value. Unlike a traditional stock purchase, you never own the shares, so you are not entitled to dividends and are not invited to shareholder meetings. Other popular futures contracts on the market include the Dow Jones symbol E-minis YM, the Nasdaq 100 NQ symbol E-minis, and the Russell 2000 E-mini ER symbol. Hedging effectively ensures an acceptable market price by mutually compensating gains and losses. Futures contracts detail the amount of the underlying asset and are standardized to facilitate trading on a futures exchange. If you understand how the futures markets work and how they could play a role in your portfolio, you can provide welcome diversification to your holdings.
Be prepared to spend a lot of time researching potential stock purchases and maintaining margins on all existing futures contracts. The margin deposit required to trade a stock index futures contract is a fraction of the future value provided by the leverage of futures trading. Even shorter term charts are affected at the start of the first month's futures contract cycle, as indicators such as moving averages require a minimum number of data periods to be generated. Before the opening of the US market, it was known that Europe was weak and that the United States would start with lower prices. Futures will move based on which section of the world is currently open, so it is important to divide the 24-hour market into time segments in order to understand which time zone and geographic region are having the most impact on the market at any given time. There is always a possibility of losing a significant part of your initial investment with only minor fluctuations in the market. The hope is that one future will outperform the other without necessarily causing the same damage to competition.
If you're up for this challenge, understanding how stock market futures work can be an invaluable tool for diversifying your portfolio.
