A Bit of Futures History
Futures are essential to worldwide commerce and trade. Futures-style trading has been around for centuries bringing buyers and sellers together to facilitate business transactions. By helping to solve potential price risk and credit problems, futures serve to increase market reliability, liquidity and efficiency, while reducing volatility.

Market Direction Does Not Matter
The long and the short of futures is that futures contracts trade bi-directionally. Futures markets and futures trading systems allow investors to buy or sell with ease. At any given time, there are numerous independent economic events occurring worldwide which cause futures contracts to rise or fall. Having no bias, futures trading systems analyze data and generate signals to enter or exit markets in a fluid manner.

If the system's investment rules and trading logic signal a rise in price, the futures trading system will generate a buy signal. Conversely, if the system's investment rules and trading logic signal a decline in price, the futures trading system will place a sell order. At times, the system will ride a trend and then reverse to benefit from a countertrend move.

The ability to go long or short presents clear advantages to the alternative investor. It increases the frequency of investment opportunity and when used skillfully can reduce risk. In contrast, the "one-direction-buy-and-hold" bias held by traditional stock traders limits investment opportunity and by definition adds risk. Fluid bi-directional futures trading can be an importing hedging tool to offset some of the risk inherent in static and under-performing long positions held in conventional stock and bond portfolios.