A True Futures Contract Is a Standardized Instrument Issued by a Futures Exchange and Hence Tradable

The origins of hedging, appropriately enough, are agricultural. For a farmer planting a crop, nothing is more crucial than the price it will fetch after it has been harvested and taken to market. But that could be lower than he expects or higher. A futures contract allows him to protect himself by committing a merchant to buy his crop when it comes to market at a price agreed when the seeds are being planted. If the market price on the day of delivery is lower than expected, the farmer is protected; the merchant who sells him the contract naturally hopes it will be higher, leaving him with a profit. As the American prairies were ploughed and planted, and as canals and railways connected them to the major cities of the industrial Northeast, they became the nation’s breadbasket. But supply and demand, and hence prices, fluctuated wildly. Between January 1858 and May 1867, partly as a result of the Civil War, the price of wheat soared from 55 cents to $2.88 per bushel, before plummeting back to 77 cents in March 1870. The earliest forms of protection for farmers were known as forward contracts, which were simply bilateral agreements between seller and buyer. A true futures contract, however, is a standardized instrument issued by a futures exchange and hence tradable. With the development of a standard ‘to arrive’ futures contract, along with a set of rules to enforce settlement and, finally, an effective clearinghouse, the first true futures market was born. Its birthplace was the Windy City: Chicago. The creation of a permanent futures exchange in 1874 — the Chicago Produce Exchange, the ancestor of today’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange — created a home for ‘hedging’ in the US commodity markets.

—Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 225-226.