Because entering the contract itself costs nothing, the buy/sell terminology is a linguistic convenience reflecting the position each party is taking - long or short.
South Africa currently hosts the largest single-stock futures market in the world, trading on average 700,000 contracts daily.
[2] After the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 became law, the two agencies eventually agreed on a jurisdiction-sharing plan and SSF's began trading on November 8, 2002.
In 2006, the brokerage firm Interactive Brokers made an equity investment in OneChicago and is now a part-owner of the exchange.
Single stock futures values are priced by the market in accordance with the standard theoretical pricing model for forward and futures contracts, which is: where F is the current (time t) cost of establishing a futures contract, S is the current price (spot price) of the underlying stock, r is the annualized risk-free interest rate, t is the present time, T is the time when the contract expires and PV(Div) is the Present value of any dividends generated by the underlying stock between t and T. When the risk-free rate is expressed as a continuous return, the contract price is: where r is the risk free rate expressed as a continuous return, and e is the base of the natural log.