Category: Managed Futures Education

New investors to the futures world often ask, “How does opening an account work?” It is a good question. Unlike traditional brokerage accounts, the rules of margin, how trades clear, and the counterparties involved operate differently. A Futures Commission Merchant, typically called by its FCM acronym, is a key player working between all the various […]

A margin call is one of the phrases that scares a new futures investor the most. Often, they picture life savings getting wiped out in seconds, as it does in movies. The truth is not nearly as intimidating. Margin is simply a tool. One that educated investors often love. After all, if you expected your […]

All traders use rules. Some program it into their systems. Others use guidelines that relate to their profit goals and risk levels and implement them with each new position. While many investors see the danger in futures, the best traders use the market features to their advantage. One thing they all share is a healthy […]

We regularly speak with aspiring CTAs and those who have recently started their program. This is an important part of our value as a database provider and asset raiser for our traders. More importantly, it is a benefit to our investment customers. After all, finding new talent with the ability to generate returns and learning […]

Many of my favorite traders focus on the grain markets. After all, we all need food, so the demand is more inelastic compared to many markets and, therefore, less sensitive to financial market conditions than most commodities. We rarely need to think much about where it comes from until recently, when we realize that our […]

For any profession, once you have done it for a while, some concepts become second nature to the point that you forget that not everyone (or very few) understands them at even a basic level. I find that options are the concept that confuses people the most and perhaps most valuable to understand. The futures […]

As one of the world’s largest futures databases, we begin talking to traders often at the earliest stages of their evolution up to billions of dollars in assets. But not all beginnings are equal, as some achieve early success and others never find it. Our challenge is determining which ones provide our investors with the […]

When launching their programs, managers in the futures space are faced with a dilemma. First, they need to choose a trade level. This is an easy process for an equity manager as they often trade 100% of the cash available and sometimes decide to use leverage. However, ALL futures contracts already have the leverage built-in, […]

By Kathryn M. Kaminski, Ph.D. Senior Investment Analyst,RPM Risk & Portfolio Management  DisclaimerWhile an investment in managed futures can help enhance returns and reduce risk, it can also do just the opposite and, in fact, result in further losses in a portfolio. In addition, studies conducted on managed futures as a whole may not be […]

Disclosure documents include performance summaries for managed futures investments. Find out how to decipher the different pieces of information these summaries provide. Upon receiving a Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) disclosure document, the first thing investors usually do is turn to the performance table found in the Past Performance section of the document. This is where […]

Many traders and investment managers have the desire to measure and compare CTA managers and / or trading systems. Risk-adjusted returns are one of the most important measures to consider since, given the inherent / free leverage of the futures markets, more return can always be earned by taking more risk. The most common risk-adjusted […]