 We are in the advanced trading strategies module using options and futures and in this course We're going to look at futures trading futures originally came about from a commodity standpoint So if you had a con harvest coming up in the future as a farmer You wanted to either hedge your harvest or you wanted to protect Your harvest with a certain minimum price the concept of futures obviously extends to all financial markets most of the indices and Commodities things like gold oil Bonds all of these have futures So futures trade just like stocks Except for there's the the big difference is that futures have a time limit in our context in the financial markets All futures have an expiry so it could be three months away It could be next month. So for example the SMP futures, which is the slash ES Has an expiry of every quarter so you'll see four contracts come up every year and They all end at the end of each quarter now There are other commodities like gold for example has a futures contract that expires every month Well, you're going to see differences like that depending on on what kind of instrument you're looking at what kind of underlying asset You're looking at it trades just like stocks and you have unlimited profits on the upside And you have unlimited losses on the downside and futures are also more Leveraged than options and we'll be looking at all of these issues as we go into the part two We are going to take you into the trading platform and show you how futures trading actually happens now the futures