CONTRIBUTORS Irina Leonova, Financial Economist, Division of Market Oversight, Commodity Futures Trading Commission David Taylor, Special Counsel, Division of Market Oversight, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Alan Deaton, Chief of Data Strategy Section, Division of Insurance and Research, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Mark Montoya, Senior Business Analyst, Federal Deposit Insurance...

The purpose of this primer is to clarify some of the key characteristics of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets. A clearer picture of these markets will help legislators and regulators write better legislation and rules for the prudential regulation of OTC derivatives markets. (Note that this Primer is followed by a short list of key definitions used to describe OTC derivatives marke...

We develop and implement a model for a profit maximizing firm that provides an intermediation service between commodity producers and commodity end-users distributed over a realistic spatial network. Producers and end-users trade with the firm through contracts for delivery of grain during the marketing season. The firm begins the marketing season with a portfolio of prearranged purchase and sa...

The focus of this work is the computation of efficient strategies for commodity trading in a multi-market environment. In today’s "global economy" commodities are often bought in one location and then sold (right away, or after some storage period) in different markets. Thus, a trading decision in one location must be based on expectations about future price curves in all other relevant markets...

At the University of Arizona, electronic trading (now commonly known as e-commerce) in the experimental laboratory began in 1976 when Arlington Williams conducted the initial experiments testing the first electronic “double-auction” trading system, which he had programmed on the Plato operating system. The term “double auction” refers to the oral bid-ask sequential trading system used since the...

Background: Commodity markets are rapidly changing across the globe due to technological and financial innovations. The introduction of commodity exchanges futures trading has significantly affected their price discovery with ramifications for users traders. mechanism in is dynamic needs regular reassessment.

The pricing of options on futures has generated much recent interest from both an academic as well as a trading persp ctive. These conti gent claims provide new avenues for the allocation of price risk among investors and have been well received by the financial markets. For example, options on Treasury bond futures began trading at the Chicago Board of Trade in 1982 and have been a very succes...