The Justinian

In recent articles I’ve discussed the two primary options for trading the price of oil directly. One is oil futures, and the other the oil ETF (exchange traded fund, symbol USO). I recently became aware of another option, which is as close as a private investor can get to trading spot oil, to […]

Talk about China’s currency never stops. So much so that most Americans have probably heard enough to develop an opinion on where the Chinese Yuan or Renminbi (RMB) is likely to go next. Trouble is, when they attempt to actually trade based on their view, they quickly realize that speculating is either impossible […]

Crude palm oil futures were supposed to be in the market being traded by the end of the year on the Joint Asian Derivatives Exchange (JADE), but traders will have to wait.
From Reuters:
Trading in futures contracts of Indonesian palm oil will now debut in the “early first quarter of 2007,” a CBOT spokeswoman told Reuters.
She […]

Nowhere is the move from floor-traded exchanges to electronic trading more obvious than on the NYMEX, the New York Mercantile Exchange. In the past, and especially leading up to that exchange’s recent IPO, seat prices–which gave the owner the right to trade on the exchange’s floor along with voting right and partial ownership–were the […]

I’ve made mention of the fierce NY-London financial rivalry in a previous post. For the uninitiated, the basic argument is that restrictive laws and policies (like Sarbanes-Oxley) have caused New York to lose its edge in financial markets. Large companies looking to go public have instead turned to London and in many cases […]

The new larger CME announces it will allow traders to trade “Credit Event Futures” based on credit-default swaps, a whopping $26 trillion over-the-counter market. The new futures contracts will only be three companies to start until further approval from the CFTC. They include the: Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune; home builder Centex Corp.; […]