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Compared to cash contracts, which require payment against the physical delivery of goods immediately or after a specified period, a futures contract is a special type of agreement made strictly under the rules of a commodity exchange, which may or may not call for the actual delivery of goods and payment in cash on a future date.

According to Emery, a futures contract can be defined as a contract for the future delivery of some commodity without reference to specific lots, made under the rules of some commercial body, in a set form, by which the conditions as to unit of amount, the quality and time of delivery are stereotyped, and only the determination of the total amounts and the price is left open to the contracting parties.

Such contracts are meant exclusively for future settlement, though the exact date of the settlement is decided by reference to the wishes of the seller and the established rules of the commodity exchange. Such contracts do not specify the particular grade of a commodity, but impliedly refer to a basic grade called the contract grade, accepted as the common grade for all futures dealings. The details in respect to the amount, the time of settlement, the quality and so forth are mentioned in the rules and regulations, and are common to all such contracts. The contracting parties have to decide upon the price at which the contract is to be settled, sometime in one of the trading months specified by the exchange.

Futures contracts are made only in the ‘ring’ of the commodity exchanges, and not outside the exchanges. Only members of a commodity exchange can enter into such a deal. No outsider can become a party to a futures agreement. Such contracts can be made only in multiples of a fixed unit of trading. No such contracts can be made in fractions of these units.

If you don’t mind losing $5,000 in 10 minutes, you may enjoy trading commodity futures contracts. There’s an old saying among commodity traders: “It’s easy to make a small fortune in commodities. Just start with a large fortune!” This is not a business for people who are emotionally attached to their money, yet thousands of average “investors” get lured into the commodity markets year after year. Why? Because of the possibility of making high percentage gains using the built-in leverage that is available to commodity futures traders.

The commodity markets include wheat, corn, soybeans, pork-bellies, gold, silver, heating oil, lumber, and numerous other common trade items. The huge companies that operate in these markets use commodity “futures” contracts to lock in their selling prices for the product in advance of delivery. This practice is called “hedging.” On the other side of that transaction is the trader, who speculates on whether the priced of the commodity will go up or down before the contract is due for delivery. Because futures contracts may be purchased using leverage, these financial instruments lend themselves to speculation.

For example, control of a corn contract worth $5,000 may only requrie $500 of actual cash, or 10% of the face value of the contract. If the corn goes up in value, and the contract becomes worth, say, $5,500, the speculator has made $500 on his or her original $500, for a 100% return. Compare this with the regular stock market, which limits leverage to 50%, so that $5,000 worth of stock requires a minimum of $2,500 of capital. If the stock goes up to $5,500 in value, the $500 gain is against $2,500 invested, for a return of “only” 20%. The 100% return sure looks a lot better, right?

You can easily see why investors in search of quick gains are hypnotized by the lure of big profits using maximum leverage in commodity futures trading. The real problem, however, is that the leverage works in BOTH DIRECTIONS. You can lose your entire investment in a matter of minutes due to the wild price gyrations that sometimes occur in these volatile markets. Let’s say the $5,000 contract drops to $4,000 in value instead of increasing. You’ve not only lost the original $500 you put into the contract, but an additional $500. You can go broke quickly this way.

So why do people play this game? Average investors do not wake up in the morning and say to themselves, “Right, I think I’ll start trading commodities.” What happens is, they receive a sales pitch from a commodity trading “guru” claiming to have a “system” for generating sure-fire profits in these wild markets. These “systems” range in price from $25 all the way up to $5,000 or more, and are sold based on the promise of “huge profits” from a small starting investment.

Newsletter writers or commodity gurus regularly pitch the myth about turning $5,000 into a million bucks in less than a year. The typical commodity system pitch comes in a long sales letter or booklet that describes a method for winning on “9 out of 10″ trades or similar inflated claims.

Of course, if it was possible to correctly trade 90% of the time, a person could easily amass millions of dollars in a very short period of time. So why are these guys so eager for you to spend $195 on their super-duper trading course? Because they probably aren’t making any real money with their own trading program! There’s much safer money to be made selling others on the idea of getting into commodity futures trading.

There is no sure-fire way to consistently make money in these markets, simply because the underlying commodity prices can swing wildly back and forth depending on a complex set of variables, many of which are totally unpredictable. That’s why the only people consistently making money in the commodity markets are the brokers, who collect a commission for executing the trade regardless of whether it wins or loses.

There are also a handful of successful professional traders who make a living in these markets. But the vast majority of people who dabble in commodity futures lose money. Unfortunately, with the lure of huge returns and easy money, a fresh crop of innocent traders enters the market each year, only to be quickly fleeced out of their money.

Don’t be one of them! Leave commodity futures trading to the professionals and stick with the more boring forms of investment, such as mutual fund investing or stocks and bonds.

Commodity futures trading is a type of investment where one can make money by speculating on the price of a certain commodity going up or down in the future. Commodities are usually the essential things that people make use of everyday. Most of the times, these commodities are the basic essentials needed by a modern society.

When talking about certain commodities being traded in the futures market, it must meet certain conditions to make it allowable for trading. One of the conditions is that the commodity should be standardized. In trading agricultural and industrial commodities, the traded commodity should be in its basic raw and unprocessed state. In this case, Wheat may be traded in the futures market but not flour.

Another condition that a certain commodity has to meet is that the perishable kind should have adequate shelf life. The reason for this is that these commodities are traded with their delivery scheduled deferred at a future time. Therefore, there may require a long shelf life so that the commodities may be delivered with its quality still good and intact. Another condition that a certain commodity should meet is that it should have a price that changes often, creating some uncertainty as well as opportunity to profit.

The history behind futures trading in commodities evolved from the farmer’s need to earn more from every harvest. Before commodity futures trading started, the farmers were always at the mercy of the dealer when it comes to pricing and selling their harvests. Dealers usually set the prices and the farmers cannot to anything but accept the terms. In a way the farmers were being exploited by some dealers and so another form of selling their harvest.

In the search for having a more fair system of doing business, farmers began offering future harvest to interested buyers. The farmers started giving their own terms for the future harvests to dealers. The transaction consists of commodities offered as a certain price and to be delivered as a specified date. Contracts were then drawn up between the farmer and the interested buyer that specified the certain amount of commodity to be delivered at a particular time in the future. From this system, what is now known as futures trading has begun.

It was sometime in 1878 that a central dealing facility for such commodities contracts was established in Chicago. In this facility, farmers and dealers began initially in spot dealing of their grains that was immediately delivered upon a reached settlement in price. It eventually evolved into futures trading when farmers started committing future harvests to interested dealers willing to buy to ensure that their grains supply are maintained in the future.

In the beginning, futures trading initially consists only of a few farm commodities such as grains. But later on, a huge number of other commodities joined in. Now there are futures trading markets that deal in precious metals such as gold, silver and platinum. There is also a futures trading market for livestock and cattle as well as for energy products such as crude oil and natural gas. It has gone on to include futures trading in coffee, orange juice ad industrials such as lumber, cotton and even on interest rate bearing instruments such as currencies and stocks.