Indews Broadcast

Cotton Futures

With Natural Gas, Copper, and Cattle out of the way, we are now off to writing an article on Cotton Futures. There was an Indian movie called Guru that was released a few years ago, and in the movie the protagonist was interested in trading Cottons, and who ended up making big money out of it, and in the end only to lose it because of the government intervention regarding the trading of commodities. It had something to do socialist policies that the Indian government was implementing and I guess trading cotton and other commodities were deemed as playing with the lives of the farmers. I am not sure what really happened regarding commodities trading or trading of cotton futures, and I don't think I want to research into it either. So, I will just be talking about cotton futures product that is traded on CME Exchange and information that will help us understand cotton futures product.

Dow Jones Today

Until now, I have written two articles on Index Futures, one being Dow Futures and the other S&P Futures. Since then, my interest in trading Index Futures especially Dow Futures has increased. I am strongly considering the possibility of trading $5 E-Mini Dow Futures Contracts. I am well aware that there are quite a few risks involved while trading futures contracts, but I think after thorough research regarding volatility and other risk factors, I might understand the art of trading index futures. At the moment, I have decided to have a 3 month learning period where I will study the movements of index futures, including what moves them and numerous variables that affect pricing of Dow futures or specifically $5 E-Mini Dow futures since they are also the most liquid index futures based on DJIA.

For those of you who are following the market will know that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been in positive territory for the past 4 days. I am going to go over the price trend of $10 DJIA futures product, as I wasn't able to find a satisfactory $5 E-Mini Dow Futures chart.

Cattle Futures

As part of my commodity articles, the third commodity that I will be covering on my block is the livestock cattle. My first 2 commodity articles were on Natural Gas and Copper. Articles I wrote for Natural Gas included Natural Gas Futures and Natural Gas Prices. For Copper, I wrote 2 articles as well, Copper Prices and Copper Consumption. In the article Natural Gas Futures, I talked about Natural Gas as a product and futures product available for trade, while article Copper Consumption discussed demand of Copper within US and the rest of the world.

For those who are interested in trading cattle, some of the futures that you can trade are Feeder Cattle and Live Cattle. Feeder Cattle are calves that have weaned away to be sent to feedlots, while live cattle are cattle that have attained a certain weight before they are sent to packers. I am not going to discuss what packers do, but lets just say that the final product ends up in your restaurant and grocery stores. Both of these futures products are available for investors to trade on Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).

Live Cattle Futures

The Live Cattle futures product has a contract size of 40,000 pounds or 18 Metric tons. So, if you buy 1 Live Cattle Futures Contract, you own 40,000 pounds of live cattle.The contract has a Tick Size of $.00025 per pound - .00025 * 40,000 pounds = $10 per contract.

New Fan site for Age of Empires 4

I think I mentioned this before, but I will state it again that I am working on a fan site on Age of Empires 4. Age of Empires has been one of my favored pc games, which I have also stated in my earlier post about Civilization 5. Most of the PC games that I play are strategy games, and are usually the type of games that I play and enjoy. I am not really a fan of first person shooting or similar genre games. I can play racing games here and there, but not as regularly as strategy games.

I don't think most of you know this but I am a big Civilization game fan. Civilization is a turn based strategy game, and by far one of my favorite games. I would rate Civilization franchise next to Age of Empires, Red Alert, and Starcraft as the best strategy games. Due to my obsession and fanatical dedication to this game, I even had a fansite dedicated to it. It has come to my attention that the folks behind the Civilization franchise have announced that a new game in the popular Civilization franchise will be released this fall. The game Civilization 5 is likely to be released in the fall of 2010.

S&P Futures and Indices

Along with Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 is another popular index and is also regarded as the "market". Similar to DOW, which has Dow futures, or futures products based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, so does the S&P 500. In fact, there are numerous indices bearing the S&P mark, with the S&P 500 being one.

Standard & Poor's

As you may have figured out from the heading above, the S&P acronym stands for Standard & Poor's. Prior to knowing the history behind the naming of the Standard & Poor, I thought it was probably named on the basis of Standard of quality of life and poverty, or "standard" companies - which are "good and healthy" companies and poor companies - which are in financial distress. I was also unsatisfied with these two explanations, as it didn't really make any sense to call them Standard & Poor's, when there are be so many better alternatives for healthy and sick companies or quality of life. After digging around, I came to know that that the Poor in S&P is actually the last name of the individual named Henry Varnum Poor, who was a financial analyst.

Dow Futures

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and DOW Futures Products

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a stock index comprising 30 corporations from a variety of industries. The current list of corporations that are part of the DOW are 3M, Alcoa, American Express, AT&T, Bank of America, Caterpillar, Boeing, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Cisco, Exxon Mobil, DuPont, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Home Depot, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, McDonald's, Kraft Foods, Merck, Microsoft, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, United Technologies Corporation, Travelers, Verizon, Walt-Disney, and Wal-Mart. The industries these corporations are in range from Banking, Chemical, and Retail to Technology, Software, and Telecommunications industry.