How confident are you in your sense of where the markets are headed?
Are you pretty good at guessing when some big company will surprise investors with boffo earnings and send stock indexes higher? Or are you prescient about Federal Reserve decisions or new inflation data that can make stocks tumble?
Well, step right up, chum. Chicago’s futures markets are giving you a chance to profit from prophecy.
CME Group, the Chicago-based owner of futures markets with a global reach, last week introduced a product line that opens a new phase of its business. They are called event contracts and are touted as a way to bring more everyday investors into the daily action.
Some will read that and say it means leading more lambs to slaughter. But that seems to be a hazard for our age; the same can be said for sports betting, now so ubiquitous the pro leagues all promote it.
The futures and options markets are bedrock Chicago industries, but they’ve always been a mystery to most people. Selling something you don’t actually own is a hard concept, and the complexity and terminology of so many contracts put people off. There have been many efforts to make futures and options more mainstream with mixed success.
With event contracts, CME Group is trying to simplify things. They are based on widely available data points such as the Standard &…
