04/14/2009

Posted by Ganesh Sivakumar

Let me begin with my favorite quote : ‘Defeat the defeat before the defeat defeats you!’

Mainframe Tips
While Browsing Internet, we have some cool option called address autocomplete.. we enter some letters in the address bar and the browser auto completes it with the closest guess. To enable this option in Mainframes,

1.Go to ISPF 3.4
2. Enter KEYS in the command line,KEYS window will popup
3. Set any key to AUTOTYPE, save and exit
4. Now type any Dataset partially and press the assigned PFkey!!

Note: It will not retrieve GDGs and VSAM files.

We sometimes come across ” Member in use ” message when we try to open any member in a PDS, if you want to know who is currently using the member, Press F1 twice

Banking terms
Hot card:
A card that is placed on the Negative File or coded as lost or stolen on a Cardholder Account File and, therefore, cannot be used in the
system.

Escheat:
Reversion of real or personal property to the State when 1) a person dies without leaving a will and has no heirs, or 2) when the property (such as a bank account) has been inactive for a certain period of time.

Beta :
The risk of any individual share can be measured as the volatility of a share relative to the market as a whole. This ratio is known as the beta of a share.

Interesting Facts
Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair (and they wear spectacles too??!!)
Women blink nearly twice as much as men (everyone knows this !! )
German Shepherds bite humans more than any other breed of dog
Colgate faced  big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking countries . Colgate translates in to the command “Go hang yourself”
It cost 7 million dollars to build the Titanic and 200 million to make a film about it !!

Chennai Special
Chennai has the highest two-wheeler population in India
The Cooum river running across Chennai was being used for water transportation in its earlier days
The Moffusil bus stand at Koyambedu, Chennai is the largest in South Asia

Inspirational Quotes
“Believe you can and you’re half way there.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.”
– William James

“Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.”
– Aldous Huxley

04/13/2009

Posted by Venkateswaran Shyamala

Domain Tip :
CFD (Contract for Difference) – A CFD is a derivative trading instrument, a contract between two parties (a buyer and a seller), in which the seller speculates upon movements in price of a traded asset between its current value and its value at an agreed future date.  The seller typically agrees to pay this price difference to the buyer, unless the difference is negative, in which case the buyer pays instead to the seller. Unlike a futures contract, there is no fixed expiry date.

CFDs are currently available either unlisted or listed [i.e.mini-warrants and ASX CFDs listed on the Australian Securities Exchange] and/or over-the-counter markets in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Singapore, South Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, France, Ireland, Japan and Spain. Some other securities markets, such as Hong Kong, have plans to issue CFDs in the near future. CFDs are not permitted in the United States, due to restrictions by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on OTC financial instruments.

Mainframe tips :
1) C ALL P’¬’ ‘ ‘ 1  changes all nonblank characters at position 1 to spaces. ¬ is obtained by typing the key for [

2) When viewing large jobs consisting of many sysout data sets or job steps , many people prefer to use the question mark at the first job-selection panel to expand the job into its constituent parts and then select the data set or job step they wish to examine. When viewing smaller job results, you can use N for Next command. Just select the entire job with an S at the job selection panel and then type an “N” at the command line to skip to the job’s next data set (you can jump to the third data set with N3).

3) The ampersand character can be used to automate the pressing of the enter key. Type &5 into the SDSF command line, and the input inhibited icon will display at the bottom left of your emulator session. SDSF then updates the display as if you pressed “Enter” every five seconds. The minmum time for auto update is 45 seconds in our setup.

Interesting facts :
The Bible is the most shoplifted book in the USA.
Every time you sneeze some of your brain cells die.
The first Harley Davidson motorcycle was built in 1903, and used a tomato can for a carburetor.

Quotes :
A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
– Winston Churchill
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
– Winston Churchill

Today in History :
In 1970, Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst. (The astronauts managed to return safely.)
In 1992, the Great Chicago Flood took place as the city’s century-old tunnel system and adjacent basements filled with water from the Chicago River.

04/09/2009

Posted by Archana Raju

Domain Tips for the day

Blue-Chip Stocks : Stocks of companies known for their
long-established record of earning profits and paying dividends. Blue
chips tend to be large, stable and well known.

Check 21 Act: Check 21 is a Federal law that is designed to enable
banks to handle more checks electronically, which is intended to make
check processing faster and more efficient. Check 21 is the short name
for the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, which went into
effect on October 28, 2004.

Technical tips for the day
While working in MS Excel we have the option of “freeze Panes”. By
this options we can freeze
some columns and have other columns scrolling. This feature is helpful
in analysis when there
are lots of columns(fields) in a file.
In mainframe too, we have similar such facility thru File-Aid.
1.Open the file in File-Aid
2. use VFMT format
3. If you want to freeze columns(fields) 1,2,3, and 6 and have the
rest as scrollable
issue command HOLD 1-3,6

Interesting facts for the day
Colgate faced big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking
countries. Colgate translates into the command “go hang yourself.”

In Michigan, a woman isn’t allowed to cut her own hair without her
husband’s permission.

You’re subject to fines and/or imprisonment for making uglyfaces at
dogs in Oklahoma.

Today in History
1825 – 1st hotel in Hawaii opens.
1849 – Safety pin patented.
1871 – William Hammond Hall’s maps & surveys of Golden Gate Park
officially accepted.
1878 – California Street Cable Car Railroad Company starts service.
1882 – Matson founds his shipping company (San Francisco & Hawaii)
1953 – House of Wax – first 3-D movie – released in New York.

Quote for the day
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

04/08/2009

Posted by Clayton Azariah

Domain Tips for the day

Balloon Mortgages: There are some regulatory institutions in U.S which supervise the U.S mortgage market. When ever a mortgage exceeds the limits of the loan set by these regulators this called balloon mortgage. These are basically short term loan with guaranteed long-term financing.

Money Market Deposit Accounts: It is a type of account where, bank offer automatic transfer service that automatically move funds from a customer’s saving account to the customer’s checking account when the customer’s checking account drops below a specific minimum

Mainframe Technical tips for the day

DBRM Browse Command : If you want to make the unicode data in the DBRM library readable issue the command “display UTF8” and to get back to the unicode data issue the command “display reset”

For selecting jobs in the SDSF/$AVRS queue: If we use “?” or “S”it gets break-up to output groups for example like JESMSGLG,JESJCL,JESYSMSG,SYSPRINT,SYSUT2,STEP01,STEP02….STEP0N etc. After opening the job using “S”/”?”, use “N” (next) or “P”(Previous) to navigate between different output groups.

Interesting facts for the day

Flatbush National Bank of Brooklyn, New York was the first bank to issue a credit card in 1946.

The first chartered bank of the United States was the First Bank of the United States, formed in 1791 by The United States Congress.

Today in History

1906 —–3rd modern Olympic games opens in Athens

1912 —– Titanic leaves Queenstown, Ireland for New York

1965 —- India and Pakistan engage in border fight

1968 —- Martin Luther King, Jr., buried in Atlanta

1991 — Date of Microsoft MS DOS 5.0

Motivational Quote for the day

For wisdom is better than all the most precious things: and whatsoever may be desired cannot be compared to it. —————— The Holy Bible

04/07/2009

Posted by Santhiya Muthusamy

Technical Tip of the Day:

Like cars, computers benefit from regular tune-ups

The simplest way to bring a flagging computer back up to speed is to clear out all the broken links, invalid paths, obsolete start-up items and auto-run programs that have accumulated in the operating system’s internal database (registry, in Windows speak). There are plenty of excellent registry tool like Ace Utilities, Acronis Disk Director, Advanced System Care, System Mechanic and Tune-Up Utilities. Most of them do a pretty good job, though some catch more clutter than others. And one or two are a bit too quick to purge everything they think is junk.

My pick would be a stand-alone utility called Registry First Aid which by contrast, makes two passes of the registry: one to find all the erroneous entries, and another to see how safe it really is to remove them. It then errs on the side of caution, and also offers the user an opportunity to second-guess it. Even when this is done, it backs up the registry before consigning to the waste bin only those entries it deems safe to delete. Registry First Aid may not make as clean a sweep as some registry editors, but it is unlikely ever to do any damage.

Once most of the junk is safely removed from the registry, it is then simply a matter of defragmenting the hard-drive. This allows files to be stored in contiguous sectors instead of being scattered as fragments all over the disk’s surface. The result is that the hard-drive’s magnetic heads do not have to spend time hunting back and forth for all the fragments before a program or data file can be loaded. My pick is again a stand-alone utility like Smart Defrag. Apart from being light and quick, Smart Defrag reorders every file on the disk (unlike the Disk Defragmenter included in Windows, which leaves many files untouched). It can also work in the background optimising the hard-drive’s performance continuously. Best of all, it’s free.

Interesting Innovation:

Wireless Charging

Why, with all the advances in technology and communications, would such a sophisticated device still need to be plugged in to be recharged? If phone calls and web pages can be beamed through the air to portable devices, then why not electrical power, too? It can be! You can soon hope to posses one of these wirless recharging devices.
Domain Tip of the Day:

Alt-A mortgages
An Alt-A mortgage, is a type of U.S. mortgage that is offered to borrowers sandwiched between subprime and prime. Alt-A interest rates, which are determined by credit risk, therefore tend to be between those of prime and subprime home loans.

(The speed with which these loans have soured in recent months has been startling. In ratings terms, Alt-A is doing worse than subprime. The biggest single Alt-A casualties are America’s bungling mortgage agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.)

Today in History:
1832 – Charles Darwin begins trip through Rio de Janeiro
1879 – Milk was sold in glass bottles for 1st time
1997 – Microsoft Corp releases Internet Explorer 4.0

Something to ponder upon
It is an indication of the topsy-turvy world in which we live that the school teacher or the nurse feels more threatened by financial conservatism than does the army general. The rectification of this anamoly calls not for chastising of the financial conservatism, but for a more pragmatic and open-minded scrutiny of rival claims to social funds.
— Amartya Sen

04/06/2009

Posted by Sivaraj Kavitha

Mainframes Tip of the day:

#1
To find the changes that you have made (without getting out of
this screen) to a pds member
Here is one simple command line command to achieve this…
Issue : COMP * X

#2
Yes, with ISPF, one can wrap the data as required.
To do that,
1.Open the dataset in ISPF EDIT mode.
2.In the first line, issue the line command: TF80 (as in this case I want to wrap to 80 chars per
line)
3.All the subsequent lines will wrap to 80 chars per line.

Domain Tip of the day:

Routing transit number
A routing transit number (RTN), routing number, or ABA(American Bankers Association) number is a nine digit bank code, used in the United States, which appears on the bottom of negotiable instruments such as cheques identifying the financial institution on which it was drawn. This code is also used by Federal Reserve Banks to process Fedwire funds transfers and by the Automated Clearing House to process direct deposits and other automated transfers. The routing number is derived from the bank’s transit number originated by the American Bankers Association, which designed it in 1910

Routing number format
The routing number consists of 9 digits:
XXXXYYYYC
where XXXX is Federal Reserve Routing Symbol, YYYY is ABA Institution Identifier, and C is the Check Digit
Number format and standards
The first two digits of the nine digit ABA number must be in the ranges 00 through 12, 21 through 32, 61 through 72, or 80.
The digits are assigned as follows:
00 is used by the United States Government
01 through 12 are the “normal” routing numbers (For example, 0260-0959-3 is the routing number for Bank of America incoming wires in New York)
21 through 32 were assigned only to thrift institutions (e.g. credit unions and savings banks) through 1985; currently they are still used by the thrift institutions, or their successors (For example, 2260-7352-3 is the routing number for Grand Adirondack Federal Credit Union in New York)
61 through 72 are special purpose routing numbers designated for use by non-bank payment processors and clearinghouses and are termed Electronic Transaction Identifiers (ETIs).
80 is used for traveler’s cheques

Internal checksums
The number must pass a checksum test using a position-weighted sum of each of the digits.
The following condition must hold:
(3(d1 + d4 + d7) + 7(d2 + d5 + d8) + d3 + d6 + d9 ) mod10=0.
(Mod or modulo is the remainder of a division operation.)
The following formula can be used to generate the 9th digit in the checksum:
d9 = (7(d1 + d4 + d7) + 3(d2 + d5 + d8) + 9(d3 + d6 )) mod10

The routing # for JPMorgan Chase is 044000037!

Canadian transit number
Canadian transit numbers are regulated by the Canadian Payments Association. A number has the following form:
XXXXX-YYY
where XXXXX is a Branch Number, and YYY is an Institution Number. The dash between the branch number and the institution number is an integral part of the transit number. This format is only valid for paper-type transactions such as cheques. For Electronic Fund Transactions (EFT) the current format is a leading zero, the institution number, then the branch number all with no dashes. For example if a check reads XXXXX-YYY , the corresponding EFT code would be 0YYYXXXXX
Inspirational Quote
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
– Edmund Burke
Today In History
Important Events on April the 7th:
1931 – Seals Stadium opens.
1933 – Prohibition ends.
1948 – World Health Organization is established.

Birthdays for April the 7th:
1860 – W.K. Kellogg, founded the cereal company.
1915 – Billie Holiday, blues singer
1932 – Mark Russell, satirist

04/03/2009

Posted by Prem Kumar Ranaveeran

Mainframes Technical tips

#1
Alternate to SuperCE Option(3.13) is to use the macro COMPARE .
Use this when you there is less difference between the two files.
1.Open a DSN in EDIT or VIEW Mode
2. On the Command line , issue COMP ‘YOUR.SECOND.COMPARISON.DSN’
3. If you want only the changes to be listed, issue COMP
‘YOUR.SECOND.COMPARISON.DSN’ EXC

#2
Here is a tip by which you can avoid ISPF 3.4 Option!!!
To Open a PS or PDS member, we usually use ISPF 3.4 to open in EDIT or BROWSE MODE.
Here is one way where one can open PS or PDS member in EDIT/VIEW/BROWSE
mode from any command line.
Thus, we can avoid using 3.4 option.
Issue : EPDF ‘MYID.MYPS’ . The Dataset will be opened in EDIT MODE
If you want to open in VIEW mode:
Issue : EPDF ‘MYID.MYPS’ VIEW
Similarly, for opening in BROWSE mode, type BROWSE at the end
#3
To list only the jobs that are ABENDED.
For such a kind of listing, use the primary command FILTER on the command line as given in
the examples below
FIL MAX AB* – shows jobs that has ABENDS
Other Examples are:
FIL MAX ‘JCL ERROR’ – shows jobs that has JCL errors
FIL MAX NE ‘RC 0000’ – shows jobs with “exceptional conditions”
FIL MAX EQ ‘RC 0000’ – shows successfully completed jobs
If you want to switch off the filter, then issue FIL OFF
#4
If you prefer a dataset to be not deleted accidentally, then
———————————————————————————————————————
USING IDCAMS USING JCL COMMENTS
———————————————————————————————————————
TO(04365) LABEL=RETPD=04365 Will protect till end of 2004
FOR(30) LABEL=RETPD=10 Will protect for 30 days
———————————————————————————————————————

If by chance of fate, you want to delete a dataset that is protected by the above method…
Use IDCAMS DELETE command with PURGE option.
e.g.,
//STEP1 EXEC PGM=EXEC
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSIN DD *
DELETE TOP.SECRET.DATA –
PURGE
/*
For more tips :

Click to access 100_Cool_Mainframe_Tips.pdf

Inspirational Quote for the day
Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
– Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC
Interesting facts

1) Technically speaking, crystal glass is actually a Liquid that flows very slowly.
2) The Bank of America was originally the Bank of Italy!
3) Top 50 banks of US
http://www.ffiec.gov/nicpubweb/nicweb/Top50Form.aspx

Domain fact – Finance term

Fisher equation
The Fisher equation in financial mathematics and economics estimates the relationship between nominal and real interest rates under inflation. It is named after Irving Fisher who was famous for his works on the theory of interest. In finance, the Fisher equation is primarily used in YTM calculations of bonds or IRR calculations of investments. In economics, this equation is used to predict nominal and real interest rate behavior. (Please note that economists generally use the greek letter p as the inflation rate, not the constant 3.14159….)
Letting r denote the real interest rate, i denote the nominal interest rate, and let p denote the inflation rate, the Fisher equation is:
Technically, this is an approximation, but as here, it is often written as an equality:
i = r + p
The Fisher equation can be used in either ex-ante (before) or ex-post (after) analysis. Ex-post, it can be used to describe the real purchasing power of a loan:
r = i – p
Rearranged into an expectations augmented Fisher equation and given a desired real rate of return and an expected rate of inflation over the period of a loan, pe, it can be used ex-ante version to decide upon the nominal rate that should be charged for the loan:
i = r + pe
This equation existed before Fisher[citation needed], but Fisher proposed a better approximation which is given below. The estimated equation can be derived from the proposed equation:
1 + i = (1 + r)(1 + p).

Microcredit
Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to those in poverty designed to spur entrepreneurship. These individuals lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history and therefore cannot meet even the most minimal qualifications to gain access to traditional credit. Microcredit is a part of microfinance, which is the provision of a wider range of financial services to the very poor.
Microcredit is a financial innovation that is generally considered to have originated with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.[1] In that country, it has successfully enabled extremely impoverished people to engage in self-employment projects that allow them to generate an income and, in many cases, begin to build wealth and exit poverty. Due to the success of microcredit, many in the traditional banking industry have begun to realize that these microcredit borrowers should more correctly be categorized as pre-bankable; thus, is one is increasingly gaining credibility in the mainstream finance industry, and many traditional large finance organizations are contemplating microcredit projects as a source of future growth, even though almost everyone in larger development organizations discounted the likelihood of success of microcredit when it was begun. The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit.

04/02/2009

Posted by Karthik Bhavani Shankar

Domain Tip of the day

OverDraft protection
An overdraft occurs when withdrawals from a bank account exceed the available balance which gives the account a negative balance – a person can be said to be “overdrawn”.
If there is a prior agreement with the account provider for an overdraft protection plan, and the amount overdrawn is within this authorised overdraft, then interest is normally charged at the agreed rate. If the balance exceeds the agreed terms, then fees may be charged and higher interest rate might apply.

Overdraft lines of credit
This form of overdraft protection is a contractual relationship in which the bank promises to pay overdrafts up to a certain dollar limit.  Overdraft lines of credit are loans and must comply with the Truth in Lending Act.

Linked accounts
Also referred to as “Overdraft Transfer Protection”, a checking account can be linked to another account, such as a savings account, credit card, or line of credit. Once the link is established, when an item is presented to the checking account that would result in an overdraft, funds are transferred from the linked account to cover the overdraft. A nominal fee is usually charged for each overdraft transfer, and if the linked account is a credit card or other line of credit, the consumer may be required to pay interest under the terms of that account.

The main difference between linked accounts and an overdraft line of credit is that an overdraft line of credit is typically only usable for overdraft protection. Separate accounts that are linked for overdraft protection are independent accounts in their own right.

Technical tip of the day

When we issue CUT , we know that the CUT content are placed in a clipboard. And when I issue PASTE, the clipboard content are pasted.
To view the content of the clipboard
Do a : CUT DISPLAY.
Clipboard manager will pop up and gives us options to edit or browse the content.

Tip to determine the Compile date of a Load Module.
Use FILE-AID !!
1. Go to FILE-AID 3.1 option
2. In the Library Utility type in the loadlib dataset name
3. Type ‘a’ next to the member nam e
4. TDATE is compile date

Quote
Ecstasy is our very nature, not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable. – OSHO

04/01/2009

Posted by Sriram Kanniah

WALL STREET KILLERS

Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS)
MBSs are simply shares of a home loan sold to investors. A bank lends a borrower the money to buy a house and collects monthly payments on the loan. This loan and a number of others — perhaps hundreds — are sold to a larger bank that packages the loans together into a security called as mortgage-backed security.

Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO)
The larger bank then classifies the shares of MBS into different levels according to their risk (called tranches – French for “slices”). They sell them to investors who buy them and ultimately collect the dividends in the form of the monthly mortgage payments. These tranches are nothing but a type of security called as collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs).

Credit Default Swaps (CDS)
Credit default swaps are insurance-like contracts that promise to cover losses on certain securities in the event of a default. The buyer of the credit default insurance pays premiums over a period of time to the seller in return for peace of mind, knowing that losses will be covered if a default of the referencing third party happens.

DESTRUCTIVE TECH FUN IN UNIX/LINUX

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
will corrupt your hard disk and make it unusable. You need to reformat and repartition your hard disk to use again. It just takes a second to run this command. Of course you need to login as root (admin user) to do this.
The above dd command will pick zeros from the zero device file and write them to the first 512 bytes of hard disk (hda). As the master boot record and partition table that reside in the 512 bytes of the hard disk becomes zeros, the hard disk will become unusable.

$ tcpdump -i wlan0 -s 0 -w packets.cap
tcpdump is an utility that will listen in the wireless network card (wlan0) and capture all the packets moving in your wireless network. The captured packets will be saved in a file with name “packets.cap”. Again, you should be ‘root’ user to capture all the packets. Yes, if your neighbour has an unsecured wireless network, you can sneak into that and run this command to know what he is doing!

GOOGLE FACTS
# Google founders Larry page and Sergey brin were drop outs from Stanford. Most of the founders of tech giants – Steve jobs, Larry Ellison, Gates, Jerry Yang, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg – were all drop outs from their respective colleges.
# Google News, an automated news aggregator was created by Krishna Bharat. Amit Singhal is called as the master of Google’s Page ranking algorithm. Both are Indian IIT grads.
# The first Google Logo was designed by Sergey Brin using the free(dom) Graphics software GIMP available in Linux Operating system. The logo had an exclamatory mark at the end mimicking Yahoo!
# Google’s super fast computing power is given by a mammoth number of inexpensive low cost Linux PCs networked together as clusters
# William Gates Computer Science building (named after Bill gates because of his funding) in Stanford University is where google was first born!

https://tcsjpmc.wordpress.com/ is a blog which will stand as an archive of all our tips. It reflects our group’s enthusiasm and will be helpful to the internet community.  NO! it doesn’t contain any personal/sensitive information. Just the tips! Please mail me if i have missed any one’s tip. I will surely post that out.

Happy Computing!

03/31/2009

Posted by Sankara Vedam

Domain Tip of the day

Options & Futures

In finance, an option is a contract between a buyer and a seller that gives the buyer the right—but not the obligation—to buy or to sell a particular asset (the underlying asset) at a later day at an agreed price. In return for granting the option, the seller collects a payment (the premium) from the buyer. A call option gives the buyer the right to buy the underlying asset; a put option gives the buyer of the option the right to sell the underlying asset. If the buyer chooses to exercise this right, the seller is obliged to sell or buy the asset at the agreed price. The buyer may choose not to exercise the right and let it expire. The underlying asset can be a piece of property, or shares of stock or some other security, such as, among others, a futures contract. For example, buying a call option provides the right to buy a specified quantity of a security at a set agreed amount, known as the ‘strike price’ at some time on or before expiration, while buying a put option provides the right to sell. Upon the option holder’s choice to exercise the option, the party who sold, or wrote the option, must fulfill the terms of the contract

In finance, a futures contract is a standardized contract, traded on a futures exchange, to buy or sell a specified commodity of standardized quality (which, in many cases, may be such non-traditional “commodities” as foreign currencies, commercial or government paper [e.g., bonds], or “baskets” of corporate equity [“stock indices”] or other financial instruments) at a certain date in the future, at a price (the futures price) determined by the instantaneous equilibrium between the forces of supply and demand among competing buy and sell orders on the exchange at the time of the purchase or sale of the contract. They are contracts to buy or sell at a specific date in the future at a price specified today. The future date is called the delivery date or final settlement date. The official price of the futures contract at the end of a day’s trading session on the exchange is called the settlement price for that day of business on the exchange.

A futures contract gives the holder the obligation to make or take delivery under the terms of the contract, whereas an option grants the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to establish a position previously held by the seller of the option. In other words, the owner of an options contract may exercise the contract, but both parties of a “futures contract” must fulfill the contract on the settlement date. The seller delivers the underlying asset to the buyer, or, if it is a cash-settled futures contract, then cash is transferred from the futures trader who sustained a loss to the one who made a profit. To exit the commitment prior to the settlement date, the holder of a futures position has to offset his/her position by either selling a long position or buying back (covering) a short position, effectively closing out the futures position and its contract obligations.

Technical tip of the day
How to Enable / Disable Run command in ‘Start Menu’.

1. Open C:\WINDOWS\system32
2. Locate and run ‘gpedit.msc’
3. On the Group Policy window, expand ‘User Configuration’ / ‘Administrative templates’
4. Select ‘Start Menu and Taskbar’
5. Select ‘Remove Run menu from Start Menu’. On the properties dialogue enable / disable Run menu and click apply and then OK.

Quote of the day
‘Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.’
— Isaac Newton