SSF's and options are different animals. Options are a decaying asset. Futures have 100 delta. They will move tick for tick with the underlying.
Options expire at the end leaving you with nothing if you don't exercise it...SSFs are futures which delivers or cash settles on the settlement date, thus you get the stock if you decided not to trade the contract...so if you long MSFT's SSF for example but did not go your way, you have many options at that point to either roll it over to the next contract or take the stocks as long term investments...you can't do that with options.
what about their narrow based indicies? i assume they would be cash settled by i couldn't find anything on their website. hope these suckers take off, but i won't be holding my breath. volume on SSFs in europe is pretty much zilch. guess the big boys have found much use for them yet. which makes me wonder about all the excellent reason given as to why firms WOULD want to trade the futures.
Hi Dan. Indicies will be cash settled. Question for you or anyone? Do European equities have uptick rules?
hi pabst. as far as i'm aware there is no uptick rule on european equities. i'm not sure whether this was a result of the introduction of SSFs there though.
For NBIs, are you sure they cash-settle them? I thought that it would essentially be a basket of stocks delivered at time of settlement? For example, if you were playing the semiconductor sector, it would basically be a future contract representing 3 to 9 stocks such as Intel, etc...and at expiration, they just journal those into your account right? By the way, you can trade OneChicago's SSF/NBI directly from either your securities or futures account, can NQLX (Nasdaq/LIFFE) do that?