SSF usually expire on the third friday of the month mentioned in the contract's name. Probably only about one April in four years will have Good Friday holiday occurring on the third friday. 2003 was one of those years, so SSF had to expire on thursday instead, this month. There are many expiration months to choose from with SSF, some of them are a couple years in the future. Even the contracts with expiration months that have no bid/ask quotes visible on market data you will actually get filled for if you place a market order. TorontoTrader may indeed want to take a look at Options as an additional alternative to SSF for longterm, but options and SSF are very different organisms. If he's happy trading SSF, he may be much better off trading the SSF with distant expiration dates. The best recommendation for trading options as preparation for trading SSF, is that after you've gotten used to banging your head on the wall of options' Time Decay, it feels so Good when it Stops!. This is why I'm so happy with SSF trading that I'm recommending it to others. A year and a half of options trading really made me appreciate the advantages of SSF. If you hold the SSF through the expiration date, you will get 100 shares of the underlying stock added or subtracted from your account in place of each SSF contract you held. The worst thing this could do to you, is if you've used more than 2:1 leverage in relation to your account size for trading the SSF, you might end up (on Interactive Brokers) having some of your positions auto-liquidated to bring your margin levels down below 2:1. So there may be a possibility that holding SSF contracts through their expiration date might result in some of your other positions getting auto-liquidated after the shares of the underlying stock have replaced the SSF in your account. If all you trade in your account are SSF, then the worst that might happen is the shares of the underlying would be delivered to your account, then they would get auto-liquidated to bring your margin below 2:1, in which case it would be like you had gotten cash-settled. As long as that auto-liquidate doesn't occur in the after-hours market, it shouldn't be too much of a concern.
Find out if your SSF is cash settlement or delivery on expiration date. If cash, you pay or get paid and, if delivery, you own them if long or must deliver them if short.