What are single stock futures?.

Single stock futures are futures contracts on individual stocks. There are currently over 80 well-known stock futures such as IBM, eBay, and Philip Morris. These futures products provide investors with a cost-effective vehicle for participating in U.S. equities markets.'

Single Stock Futures offer investors a cheaper way of investing in the equity markets and should, therefore, have considerable appeal. They represent one the most interesting developments in the field of financial derivatives. This is both because of their trading potential, which is very large, and the fact that they have only recently became legal in the US.'

With SSF, investors are now able to trade futures contracts on some of the most popular individual stocks traded on stock exchanges in the US, or on “baskets” of stocks in selected sectors. SSF include approximately 50-70 of the most popular and actively traded stocks in the U.S., such as Microsoft, Pfizer, General Electric, IBM, Citigroup, AOL Time Warner, and Johnson & Johnson, to name a few. In addition, investors can also trade Narrow Based Indices (“NBI”). NBI are small groups of stocks in a concentrated area of the equities market, such as airlines, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, energy and automotive.'