Most of the people who invest in stocks, only know about the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or the NASDAQ over the counter market. Futures trading is one of the ways to grow your wealth. There are many dozens of futures contracts that you can trade ranging from crude oil, gold, ethanol, heating, gasoline, silver, copper, wheat, corn, coffee, soybeans, pork bellies, cattle, interest rates, currencies and others.
If you want to profit from commodities than futures trading is the best and direct method of getting access to the commodity market. There are several active futures trading exchanges in the US. Three of the world’s largest futures exchanges are located in Chicago.
The largest futures trading exchange in US is Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). A large number of futures contracts get traded on CME that includes commodities, stock index futures, foreign currencies, interest rates, environmental futures and others.
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.
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. CME provides you with the opportunity to trade futures contracts on these stock indexes as well as their mini versions the E-Minis.
Other important futures contracts that get traded on CME include single stock futures, futures on ETFs and futures on Japanese Nikkei 225 Index. CME group also has the GLOBEX Electronic Trading Platform that allows electronic trading of futures contract almost around the clock.
The second most important futures exchange is the CBOT ( Chicago Board of Trade). Mini contracts on corn, soybeans and wheat are also available for trading on CBOT. The futures contracts that are available on CBOT include agricultural futures like the soybeans, ethanol, rice, corn, wheat and others.
Interest rate related futures contracts that get traded on CBOT include Treasury Bonds, FED Funds, spreads, municipal bonds, German debt and swaps. Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) futures popularly known as Dow futures and its E-Mini version plus gold and silver futures and their mini versions also gets traded on CBOT.
The third most important exchange is NYMEX. Now the best place to trade crude oil, natural gas, gasoline as as well as a host of other energy futures in the NYMEX (New York Mercantile Exchange).This is infact the global hub for energy trading and offers futures contracts on unleaded gasoline, heating oil, electricity, light sweet crude, natural gas, propane and coal.
NYMEX also provides you with the opportunity to trade precious metals like the gold, silver, platinum as well as palladium. You can also trade metals like copper and aluminum on NYMEX. Futures trading is something that is not difficult to do once you get the hang of it. In the beginning, you should just paper trade these contracts for a few months!
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