What is a futures contract?

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Commodities were the first futures contracts, but these days, there’s more volume in financial futures.

© Marcia Straub—Moment/Getty Images, © richcano—E+/Getty Images, © HUIZENG HU—Moment/Getty Images; Photo composite Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

What will the price of a barrel of oil be in six months? How much will a bushel of wheat set you back a year from now? Nobody knows for sure. But such questions are why futures markets and futures contracts exist.

Futures markets are a mechanism through which investors and traders track the fair value of financial assets—commodities, stock indexes, interest rates, and others—weeks, months, or years down the road. Futures contracts are actively traded on exchanges, just like stocks, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

When you buy or sell a futures contract, you enter a legal agreement that spells out standardized specifics and obligations. For example, one West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures contract is based on 1,000 barrels of oil to be “delivered” by a certain date at a certain price at a certain geographic location (a major oil storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, in the case of WTI futures). In another example, one futures contract based on corn represents 5,000 bushels of the grain.

Standardization is the key to futures, as it makes each contract “fungible” with all other contracts of that delivery date. You can buy and sell contracts knowing that each one is the same.

Actual delivery of commodities such as oil, copper or cattle is infrequent. The overwhelming majority of futures contracts are liquidated—sold or bought back to close out the position—well before the final delivery date, when the contract officially expires. The buyer or seller may have been using futures to hedge, or protect, their business against adverse price swings—say, a farmer seeking to lock in a specific corn price before the actual harvest.

Futures can be also used to speculate on the price of a commodity or on the direction of interest rates or equity benchmarks like the S&P 500 Index.

Exchanges. Futures, like stocks, are mostly traded electronically on exchanges (CME Group is the largest U.S.-based futures exchange operator). Futures exchanges perform similar functions to stock exchanges, providing a centralized forum for buyers and sellers to conduct business. The futures exchanges also play an important role as a “backstop” to every trade, guaranteeing that a contract will be honored and reducing so-called counterparty risk.

Commercial entities. Futures are traded by a variety of people and businesses for a variety of reasons. The aforementioned farmer may use futures to protect her business in case a major drought cuts the harvest. Oil companies are active players in energy markets, as they seek to insulate against expected events that may affect oil or natural-gas prices. These are examples of end users, or “commercials.”

Speculators. Some futures participants have no interest in owning the actual commodity. They’re called speculators, and they’re in it to “buy low, sell high,” or the other way around, as they try to take advantage of price gyrations. (Yes; futures traders can initiate a futures position with a “sell” order just as easily as with a “buy” order.) Combined, the speculators and commercials provide critical liquidity for a properly functioning futures markets, ensuring there are sufficient numbers of buyers and sellers (again, similar to stocks).

Actively traded futures markets based on commodities like crude oil, copper, gold, and grain, along with futures based on interest rate benchmarks (such as the 10-year treasury note) or stock indexes (like the S&P 500) are widely followed by investing and market professionals as gauges and bellwethers for the economy’s health, consumer behavior and sentiment, food supplies and prices, and more.

Individual investors don’t have to trade futures to gain useful insights from these markets. Take crude oil, for example. Oil soared above $100 a barrel during summer 2022, driving up pump gasoline prices and contributing to consumer inflation that had been running at four-decade highs. How long might that trend continue?

A look at the forward curve—a listing of several futures contract months on a chart—can give you a bit of insight. Note that, in the table below, the near-term delivery months were trading well above those of longer-dated futures contracts.

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FORWARD AND DOWNWARD. Where might commodity prices be next year or the year after that? Some futures markets, such as crude oil, list contracts for delivery many months, even years, in the future. For example, in the summer of 2022, the near-term contract (September 2022 delivery—$95.56, black line) was trading far above those for delivery in December 2022 ($90.19, yellow line), September 2023 ($82.30, blue line), June 2024 ($77.90, purple line), and June 2025 ($73.51, green line). Data source: CME Group. For illustrative purposes only.

Source: Barchart.com

Margin, or borrowed money, is used in both futures and stocks. But again, there are key differences. Futures traders must post an initial margin requirement, also known as a performance bond. These are good-faith deposits compelling each party in a trade to meet their obligations. Initial margin requirements in futures vary depending on the futures contract, but are usually just a small percentage (3% to 12%) of the underlying (notional) value of the asset. Through margin, a trader can control a large position with a relatively small amount of money down.

By contrast, equity investors trading on margin borrow money from a broker to purchase stock, though they can’t use this “leverage” to nearly the same degree as they can in futures (typically, an equity trader using margin can borrow 30% to 50% of the total price).

Here’s another key difference between futures and stocks: A futures contract has a fixed life span—an expiration date—while shares of stock could be held, in theory, as long as the company is traded publicly. But most futures contracts aren’t held to expiration. As a contract nears expiration, many traders close or roll their positions into a later month.

Futures markets aren’t for every investor. But they do represent a collective “best guess” drawn from the collective wisdom of the marketplace on the short- and long-term path for an array of commodities and financial products that affect everyone. For that reason, futures can provide valuable insight for individual investors. But trading futures is quite a different proposition, as these instruments carry unique risks that should be considered carefully.