I've seen people checking futures while they are thinking of buying/selling a stock. Is there futures for all stocks or just general futures? I guess I'm confused on the whole futures thing in general, but I want to see anything corresponding to AAPL in particular. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.|||AAPL does have futures, which trade on the OneChicago. Any broker that allows you to trade futures or Single Stock Futures will allow you to trade these. But these only trade during regular market hours, whereas AAPL stock trade in both premarket and aftehours trading via ECNs like ARCA.
But when people are 'checking futures before they buy/sell a stock', they are looking at what the ES futures (S%26amp;P) are doing in pre-market (or after-market) trading. If you assume that your stock will go up or down with the overal market, and the premarket activity in Futures will indicate a strong or weak open, then this is an understandable approach.|||There are futures for some stocks. The contracts are for 100 shares apiece. They are run through an exchange called OneChicago. You aren't going to be able to get quotes on these futures from your normal stock brokers. I have an account through Interactive Brokers, and you can get quotes through them. The spreads seem pretty wide on those (about $0.09-$0.15/share). Personally, I've never traded them, but one of the folks I get newsletters from has said even though they don't appear to have much liquidity, you can trade them, and if you put in a reasonable bid/offer, it will get filled. The Apple September contract today about halfway through the day has 5 contracts (500 shares) traded...the June contract had about 63 contracts...so it is pretty clear not a lot of people are trading these.
Futures contracts for the indexes trade a lot more volume. The main indices traded are the S%26amp;P 500, the Nasdaq, and the Dow. You can also trade the Russell 2000, and other indices. The S%26amp;P contracts traded 722,000 contracts on the near month yesterday, which if you consider each contract is worth 50 times the S%26amp;P index (or about $70,000 per contract), that's a lot of volume. Delayed quotes on the index futures are available on cmegroup.com. You probably need a futures account to get live quotes. OneChicago has a site for the single stock futures contracts, the info is delayed, and the site is convoluted, but I put the link below.
www.onechicago.com|||I think you are interested in options which are trading instruments that let you speculate on the upside or downside of a stock going forward in the future . They have many uses from outright speculation on the future price if a stock and can be used to hedge your own stock positions. They can be very useful in your portfolio but I suggest you research their properties before you venture in.
http://biz.yahoo.com/opt/
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