Unlike a bond or a stock, futures contracts do not represent a long-term investment with income potential. In fact, a futures contract does not pay any interest or dividends. Investors use futures markets for two purposes; hedging and speculation.

Hedging

In hedging, futures are used to offset specific risks. Generally, make a decision to take on certain types of risks and to avoid others. For example, an oil company might decide not to trade oil futures, as shareholders in the company have chosen to take oil-related risks. But the same company might buy currency futures to offset exchange rate risks.

Speculation

Although futures markets were developed to hedge risk, a lot of trading in the market is done with the intention of profiting from changes in the prices of futures of contracts.

With the help of Barchart, www.barchart.com, traders can spot longer-term or emerging trends in the futures market to get an edge. Traders can review free futures charts on Barchart to spot the trends in the future market.

Barchart offers news and commentary on the futures market. Traders can access Inside Futures Commodity, which includes leading market research, commentary, and analysis from industry leading firms and trading experts. Traders also receive market news for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Futures Performance Leaders page on Barchart.com includes a list of commodities contracts with the highest and lowest percent change. The Futures Performance page includes four standard views. The Chart View includes free futures charts. The page displays a graph that shows Performance Leaders as green bars. There is also a Technical View, which includes Contract, Last Price, Today’s Opinion, 20-Day Relative Strength, 20-Day Historic Volatility, 20-Day Moving Average Volume, 52 week high and 52 week lows.

Traders can choose from a number of time frames, which include 5-day, 1-month, 3-month, 6-month, 12-month, and year-to-date. Thus traders can spot longer-term or emerging trends.

The Hot Futures page on Barchart.com includes a list of the most volatile futures contracts. The contracts are ranked by Standard Deviation and then compared to their data in the past 20-periods. The Chart View for Hot Futures includes free futures charts. The Chart View includes a graph that shows bullish movers as green bars and bearish movers as red bars. The Performance View includes Contract, Last Price, Weighted Alpha, YTD Moving Average, YTD Percent Change, 1-month, 3-month, and 1-year Percent Change. The Technical View consist of Contract, Last Price, Today’s Opinion, 20-day Relative Strength, 20-day Historic Volatility, 20-day Average Volume, 52 week High and 52 week Lows.

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