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.
Cotton Futures
Cotton futures fall under the category "soft commodity" - and I think you can realize why the commodity is called "soft". Besides cotton, cocoa, coffee, and sugar are also considered soft commodities. I am not sure what makes these commodities "soft" as well, but if you compare these commodities to metals and energy products, I guess you can consider them relatively "soft". It could also be that these "soft" commodities can be consumed, as you can eat cocoa, sugar, etc. but that wouldn't explain cotton - which cannot be consumed but is truly "soft". The cotton futures contract has a size of 50,000 pounds, similar to feeder a cattle future which also has 50,000 pounds for contract size. The contract also has a minimum fluctuation of $.0001 per pound. So, a $.0001 fluctuation per pound will lead to a fluctuation of $5 per contract. Futures contract for cotton are traded on CME GLOBEX, and you have to remember that NYMEX which cotton futures used to trade on was acquired by the CME Group in 2008.
Other Commodity Futures
As I mentioned earlier, I have written articles for Natural Gas, Copper, and Cattle prior to writing Cotton Futures article. If possible, I would suggest you have a look at my Natural Gas Futures article, and the two index articles I wrote. The two index articles covered futures products based off of the popular Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500. The article Dow futures talks about some of the major futures products based of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, including the Big Dow and the $5 E-Mini Dow. The S&P futures talks about numerous futures products based on the index S&P 500, and many other indices bearing S&P name. For those who are interested in looking at what Dow Jones has been up to today, I would suggest the article Dow Jones Today.
Cotton Futures
