What are Emini Index Futures Contracts?
They are electronically traded, smaller (mini) versions of larger market indexes. For example the DOW Emini futures tracks the DOW market index and the S&P 500 Emini futures tracks the S&P 500 index. A futures contract is an agreement between two parties, a buyer and a seller, to deliver a certain commodity by a certain date. For example, if you bought a futures contract of pork bellies and held the contract until the expiration date you would be physically delivered pork bellies. Don’t worry, you won’t be getting 40,000lbs of pork bellies delivered on your front lawn. The futures indexes we trade are cash settled markets, meaning nothing physically gets delivered. If you held one of these contracts until expiration (something we don’t ever do) you would either show a profit or a loss, but you wouldn’t get anything delivered.
