History
In the United States, trading of futures contracts for agricultural commodities dates back to at least the 1850s. In the 1920s, the federal government proposed the first regulation aimed at futures trading, and passed the Grain Futures Act in 1922. Following amendments in 1936, this law was replaced by the Commodity Exchange Act. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was established in 1974, under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Act. The regulation led to the recognition of a new group of money managers including CTAs. At that time, the funds they operated became known as managed futures. In the late 1970s, the relatively new managed futures funds began to gain acceptance. Although the majority of trading was still in futures contracts for agricultural commodities, exchanges started to introduce futures contracts on other assets, including currencies and bonds. In the 1980s, the futures industry developed significantly following the introduction of non-commodity related futures and by 2004 managed futures had become a $130 billion dollar industry.
Read more about this topic: Managed Futures Account
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (19131960)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (18421910)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (18741936)