Compact index futures as diversified contract selection

How the compact family was listed

Around 2020 a compact futures marketplace listed cash-settled index contracts priced like equities so profit, loss, and risk could be computed without memorizing traditional commodity point values. Three index futures were already trading and two more were planned, so the listed menu was a short set of diversified underlyings rather than a full single-commodity complex.

The archive facts describe that historical workflow. The editorial task is to read the same listing rules as a contract-selection step that comes before a directional view.

Tick-equivalence, expiry, and the two-month-strip

Every contract in that family moved in 0.01 increments worth one dollar. That tick-equivalence meant the contract could be sized with equity-style arithmetic. Every expiration fell on the third Friday of the month rather than on commodity-industry calendars, which is the uniform-expiration rule for the family.

Only the nearby month and the following month were listed at any time. Under that two-month-strip convention, calendar spreads beyond one month were not available. Because the contracts used cash-settlement, an unrolled position was adjusted to the difference between the entry price and the final settlement price instead of converting into physical delivery.

Published-basket-weights and the notional-multiplier

The published-basket-weights decided the intermarket exposure of a single position. The notional-multiplier was the factor of 100 applied to the displayed index price to obtain the dollar value of one contract.

The equity-basket contract held 75 names in five equally weighted sectors of 15 stocks each. Notional was 100 times the index, so a print of 50.00 implied 5000 dollars of stock exposure and the listed margin was 495 dollars.

The dollar-basket contract spread U.S. dollar exposure across seven currencies, with the euro at 33.9 percent, the Chinese renminbi at 21.3 percent, and the Mexican peso at 3.8 percent at the time of writing. Weights were updated annually. A print of 150.00 implied 15000 dollars of currency notional, and the listed margin was 159 dollars.

The precious-metals contract combined gold, silver, and platinum by global production, U.S. consumption, and trade volume. One contract then represented about 0.024 ounces of gold, 0.963 ounces of silver, and 0.0051 ounces of platinum, or roughly 69 percent, 24 percent, and 7 percent of the mix.

Editorial reading of the listed mix

Editorial reading: one equity-basket lot already embeds a five-sector stock mix, one dollar-basket lot already embeds a seven-currency mix, and one precious-metals lot already embeds a three-metal mix. The two-month-strip does not list a longer calendar that would separate those mixes.

The selection question is therefore which published basket belongs in the book, not which distant month of a single commodity to roll. The archive does not rank these contracts or state a later result.