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In finance, a futures contract (more colloquially, futures) is a standardized forward contract which can be easily be traded between parties other than the two initial parties to the contract. The parties initially agree to buy and sell an asset for a price agreed upon today (the ''forward price'') with delivery and payment occurring at a future point, the ''delivery date''. Because it is a function of an underlying asset, a futures contract is a derivative product. Contracts are negotiated at futures exchanges, which act as a marketplace between buyers and sellers. The buyer of a contract is said to be long position holder, and the selling party is said to be short position holder. As both parties risk their counterparty walking away if the price goes against them, the contract may involve both parties lodging 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. The first futures contracts were negotiated for agricultural commodities, and later for natural resources such as oil. Financial futures were introduced in 1972, and in recent decades, currency futures, interest rate futures and stock market index futures have played an increasingly large role in the overall futures markets. The original use of futures contracts was to mitigate 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.〔 ==Origin== The first futures exchange market was the Dōjima Rice Exchange in Japan in the 1730s, to meet the needs of samurai who—being paid in rice, and after a series of bad harvests—needed a stable conversion to coin.〔 〕 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 commodities as well as a number of futures exchanges set up in countries around the world.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=timeline-of-achievements )〕 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. The 1972 creation of the International Monetary Market (IMM), the world's first financial futures exchange, launched currency futures. In 1976, the IMM added interest rate futures on US treasury bills, and in 1982 they added stock stock market index futures.〔(Leo Melamed Biography on LeoMelamed.com )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Futures contract」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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