Much of the futures trading you hear about is done as speculation. A futures contract guarantees delivery of a certain commodity at a certain price at a certain point in the future. So oil for June delivery at $55 a barrel.
But a lot of the trading (at least the kind that you see in movies, where agitated bros in Armani suits guzzle red bull and yell things across crowded trading floors and slam their terminals against their desks) represents a bet on where oil prices are going, not an actual attempt to procure oil.
However, there are people who are actually trying to get oil. For those people, there exist approved delivery facilities. These locations represent the place where the commodities get delivered when a futures contract is executed.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is After Hours Trading?1 Views
finance a la shmoop what is after-hours trading well, Wall Street really never [Group of people dealing stocks and shares]
does sleep the normal American stock market runs from 9:30 until 4:00 p.m.
New York time on weekdays so trades happening during that period of time are
just normal not after hours but like I don't know
just on hours....anyway after hours is [New York City becomes dark after hours]
different the city gets dark seemy characters roam the streets
trading stocks from building corners and alleyways yes or maybe not but at 4:01
p.m. after-hours trading begins it's not like a minute earlier there was demand
for a million shares a second to trade on the various primary stock exchanges
and then a minute later demand was zero demand continues always and shares do
trade after market hours more or less all the time the NYC and Nasdaq [People waving at NASDAQ[
exchanges are closed but there are lots of private exchanges or EC ends
electronic communication networks which trade 24/7 365 days a year
well trading is usually much smaller in volume after hours but that volumes [Trading decreases in size]
grown a ton in the last decade and the after-hours number is often useful to
gauge how well or poorly accompanies announced after 4:00 p.m. New York Time [Man reading newspaper]
quarter was received well the after-hours markets indicate almost
immediately and while not always right they give a sense for the direction that
the stock will open the following day on the main exchanges it's also a good time
to build a position secretly without lots of people inspecting on you
screaming out to the New York Stock Exchange I want 18 million shares of [Man screams for shares at New York Stock Exchange]
whatever.com...got it? so if you want to trade on those markets well, you fill
out some forms pay a small entry fee as you buy three large diet cokes and a [3 diet coke cans and a popcorn bucket]
bucket of popcorn and you think about the irony of having ordered your coke as
diet and then you can trade anytime you like yeah in your underwear too it's
kind of fun [Man standing in his underpants]
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