Example:
The language programmers use to create software sound a lot like the fairy godmother's incantation: grep, mov, end if, cur_x, and selField. And software really is magical. You slide a DVD into your PC, or you invoke your PC-maybe with a touch , maybe at the sound of your voice-or you point at a little picture with a mouse and click, and suddenly all these things begin to happen that could only be witchery. Beautiful color images and voices and sounds emanate from your Pc. The software looks at a few numbers and predicts banana
futures in three months. Ask for information on a person, a country, or a date, and the software responds like a crystal ball. You ask the software to take you to another computer on another continent, and in seconds you' re there; magic carpets really can 't compete. — p. 54, How Computers Work, by Ron White and Tim Downs, 2014
How do you understand the term banana futures?
Best Answer
COMMODITY futures is common market shorthand for "future prices of COMMODITY": the price which the commodity will command in the future. In your example, the software predicts what bananas will cost three months from now.
COMMODITY futures is also used for "future contracts in COMMODITY": the present purchase of the commodity for future delivery. If I am a manufacturer of frozen banana cream pies I want to assure my plant of a future flow of ripe bananas. I may contract with a specific grower or distributor of bananas to deliver so many tons of bananas in September, so many in October, and so forth.
And COMMODITY futures is also used for the "current prices of banana contracts for future delivery". There are international markets where standardized futures contracts are traded: there will typically be a distinct current price for each future month: September bananas, October bananas, and so forth, each representing the collective guess about what bananas will cost in those future months.
In effect, all three are the same thing: a prediction of future prices under which the producers and users of bananas balance future supply and demand by separating the physical commodity from the risk and opportunity of future price movements, which they sell to speculators. The producers and users get the commodities at a certain price, and the speculators get the opportunity for profit.