In recent months, a sense has emerged that the exchange-traded currency futures market in India is more liquid than the corresponding contract traded OTC (i.e. the forward market). As an example, we examine a dataset from NSE of 28,797 observations of data – one observation per second – from 3 November 2009, for the November [...]

Adam Hamilton of Zeal LLC is one commentator I have been following for many years. His latest one on the Commitments of Traders Report is essential reading:
“The bottom line is gold futures activity as chronicled in the CFTC’s Commitments of Traders Report is often misunderstood. A minority of analysts choose to interpret facts about week-to-week [...]

At NSE, currency futures did $1.8 billion yesterday. With this, India is starting to look like the first country where the turnover of the currency futures market is big when compared with the currency forward market.
Turnover is, of course, not liquidity. Liquidity is about the transactions cost faced when transacting. Liquidity comparisons [...]

There is a massive change in the institutional gold market.  The CME Group has announced, “In response to market needs, CME Group will offer a clearing service for the OTC London gold forward market beginning September 20, 2009 for trade date September 21, 2009.”
After an analysis of the governing terms, policies, procedures and methods I [...]

FUTURES AND FORWARD CONTRACTS
Many commodities trade via forward or futures contracts.  A forward contract is is an agreement between two parties to buy or sell an asset at a specified point of time in the future.  A futures contract is a standardized contract to buy or sell a specified commodity of standardized quality at a certain [...]

Some useful observations on the gold market in a recent Unqualified Reservations blog entry:
One trivial example of a liquid, functioning prediction market that does not, and cannot, produce accurate predictions is the gold futures market. The gold futures market is a large, active and efficient market in future gold, but in hindsight it demonstrates little [...]