Under the Counter

Third time’s a charmOne of the great truisms of the futures business is the astonishing failure rate of new contracts; I haven’t studied the figures myself but I understand FOW’s data suggests a large majority of new contracts either don’t trade at all or lapse into moribundity pretty rapidly after fanfare launch. This all stands to reason, of course: the cost of listing most contracts is minimal for exchanges and I have spoken to at least one bourse boss who – in private – freely admits to taking an approach of “throwing lots of contracts...