Courtesy of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange

Reading Quotes

Futures -- Prices are published for every trading session.

Futures prices are reported daily in major newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal. Following is a brief explanation to help you decipher these listings. Section 2 of The Wall Street Journal contains futures price and volume quotes from the previous trading session. Contracts are grouped into like commodities such as Food and Fiber, Metals and Petroleum, Financial and Livestock and Meat.

Futures Stats

Over 395 million futures contracts were traded on U.S. futures exchanges in 1995. In parentheses, and adjacent to the name of the contract, is the abbreviation of the exchange on which the contract is traded. Each of the contracts shown in The Wall Street Journal listing on the previous page are traded at the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange). Let's use the Live Cattle listing as an example. Just to the right of the exchange abbreviation (CME) is the contract size and the cost per unit. With Live Cattle, a contract represents 40,000 pounds of cattle. The prices quoted are listed as cents per pound (i.e., 67.85 cents per pound).

Each contract maturity or delivery month is listed downward along the left margin. Just next to the settle is the net Change in the closing price from the prior day's trading session. In this case, the net change is + .40.

The next two columns indicate the Lifetime High and Lifetime Low for the contract. The last item is Open Interest, which indicates the number of open positions in that contract. Remember, when two people trade one contract (one trader buying from a trader selling), that represents one open interest.

At the bottom of each contract heading (under the quotes for that particular commodity) is another line that provides information detailing:

-- The estimated volume of contracts trading that day.
-- The volume traded in the previous session.
-- Total open interest for all contracts in this particular commodity.
-- The net change in open interest from the previous trading day.

Options

Information on options prices can also be found easily in The Wall Street Journal. You can find out the previous day's closing prices for all available options, as well as strike prices and expiration months.