Dalian Commodity Exchange - Realized Price and Predicted Price: Futures Trading at Work

Realized Price and Predicted Price: Futures Trading At Work

Commodity Futures form an advanced clearing function for the physical commodity clearing. Each Futures contract would generate a particular pattern of cash flow and cash commitment at a given price between the counterparties. In a Futures contract, payments are being made all along the life of the contract, whenever the Futures price changes. This is called "mark to market". Concretely, these payments involve additions and subtractions from "margin accounts" held at the Futures clearinghouse. It is significant that both the long and short side have to put up margin, because at the moment the contract is entered, both are in a sense equally likely to lose and so equally likely to have to make a payment to the other side. By means of Margin Calls, Commodity Futures shifts future imbalances between cash inflows and outflows into the present. Financial crisis in the present can also arise when these future imbalances get so large that they disrupt the present.

At any moment, a particular pattern of cash flows and cash commitments resolves itself into a particular pattern of clearing and settlement. Deficit Agents in the trade will need to borrow cash from banks today to delay settlement of that Commodity Futures. Of course, banks will not hold this risk unless they are compensated by an expectation of profit. But by means of credit, current imbalances are pushed into the future where, hopefully, they can be offset against a pattern of imbalances going the other way. And the elastic availability of such promises to pay are the essential source of elasticity in the payment system. In some sense, the futures market works just the opposite from the credit market. The credit market operates to postpone settlement until a future date or dates, while the futures market operates to accelerate settlement to a present date or dates.

It is important to emphasize that Futures contracts, like debt contracts, are in zero net supply in the aggregate economy. One person's long contract is another person's short contract. Further, the quantity of outstanding contracts, called the open interest, has no tight relation to the quantity of the underlying. It's an approximate measure of the elasticity of uncertainty relative to the convergence of price.