President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Equity futures contracts expire quarterly. So there is a contract that will expire in March (end of this week). One that will expire in June. One in September. One in December. And then contracts for those months more than a year out, etc.

When you hear a report about where the futures are trading, they are talking about the most "forward" contract, where the process of settlement hasn't already begun. The March futures for this year are already in that process (they expire on Friday), so anyone wanting to trade a forward contract has already (or should have) rolled their position into the June contract. So in this case, you are talking about a futures contract that settles on the third Friday in June.

Futures try to discount the things you are talking about, and they are generally remarkably good at cutting through information and handicapping when disruptions are just short term vs. when they may have more lasting impact, but even crowds can't predict the future. With something like this, it's a bit of a crapshoot.

Also, I know what people are being fed is that US equities are selling off because of the virus, but it's way more complicated than that. The virus was a catalyst, but fundamentally US equity markets were already way out of whack -- over the last few years, earnings went nowhere in real terms, but prices shot through the roof. That isn't normal. So yes, the virus is going to have a huge impact on earnings (and the stock market when left alone, the way it hasn't been, is an earnings discounting mechanism), but we have gone a very long time now in which the stock market wasn't being allowed to serve that function as a discounting mechanism. If we get back to an unmanipulated environment, things need to reprice permanently, to put a value on stock prices. If that is allowed to happen finally, the need for that happen was due to all the liquidity that was injected over a long period of time that distorted prices so much. It's not the virus that caused that, it was the manipulation that started well before the virus.