Thursday, May 27, 2010

Major Futures Trading

Futures trading is one of the ways to make money and grow your wealth overtime. Many people only invest in stocks. However, trading futures contracts like copper, wheat, corn, coffee, soybeans, pork bellies, cattle, crude oil, gold, ethanol, heating, gasoline, silver, interest rates, currencies and others can be highly lucrative.
Richard Dennis had started with only $400 and ended up making more than $200 Million trading commodities. If you want to trade commodities than trading commodity futures is the best way to profit from the boom in the commodity market. Now, let's discuss the three largest futures exchanges in the world. There are many futures exchanges in the world but these three are the most popular and the most important.
The number one is the CME ( Chicago Mercantile Exchange). The futures contracts that get traded on CME include among others stock index futures, foreign currencies, interest rates, commodities, environmental futures and others. Futures trading is no doubt risky but if you learn it, it can be highly profitable. As said before, Ricard Dennis and his turtles used to trade the most liquid contracts in the market.
Now as said before, commodities is an important asset class. CME provides you with the opportunity to trade many commodity contracts. The commodities futures that get traded on CME include cattle, butter, limber, pork bellies, Goldman Sachs Commodities Index, live cattle, milk, lean hogs, feeder and fertilizer.
CME provides you with the opportunity to trade futures contracts on these stock indexes as well as their mini versions the E-Minis. Now, one of the ways to trade stock market is to trade stock indexes like the various S&P 500 like the S&P 500 Midcap, Small Cap as well as the Russell 2000 and the NASDAQ 100.
You can easily trade almost all these contracts from the comfort of your home electronically using your computer.GLOBEX is the Electronic Trading Platform owned by the CME Group that allows the electronic trading of these contracts almost 24 hours a day.
The second most important futures exchange is the CBOT ( Chicago Board of Trade).The futures contracts that are available on CBOT include agricultural futures like the soybeans, ethanol, rice, corn, wheat and others. Mini contracts on corn, soybeans and wheat are also available for trading on CBOT.
A mini version of Dow Futures called the E-Mini Dow is also available. You can also trade mini versions of gold and silver futures contract on CBOT. CBOT gives you the opportunity to trade one of the most popular stock indexex the DJIA Dow Jones Industrial Average) in the form of Dow Futures.
The next major futures trading exchange is the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). This is infact the global hub for energy trading and offers futures contracts on light sweet crude, natural gas, unleaded gasoline, heating oil, electricity, propane and coal.
Futures contract on precious metals like gold, silver, platinum and palladium also get traded on NYMEX. Futures contracts on metals like copper and aluminum also are available on NYMEX.

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