Salt Lake Telegram | 1917-06-24 | Page 24 | Tells How Wheat Men Deal in Futures

"bull." and boy December and May wheat. . Again waah sale, are ased, thl. time to help increase the price. Humors Hu-mors of crop failures are spread; dir. predictions are made, to give til. Im- fresslon of a decreased supply, and he continual buying from one another an-other goes on. Slowly the price Is boosted. Then the terminal elevator owner, who holds the actual wheat, lift. th. price to the flour miller, and th. miller can point to the blgh price of December wheat and raise th. nrlre of flour. And they do that very thing. - Raising or lowering the price of future fu-ture wheat affects the price of cash wheat, and flour prices are based upon the priceof cash wheat that I., wheat actually sold. Nor Is it alone in wheat that future fu-ture deliveries are gambled In. There la May pork and July pork; May lard and July lard: May ribs and July ribs; July corn and September corn; July oats snd Beptember oau; May Haz and July flax. By future trading, one man can get millions of bushels by putting up a small portion of the price. With only cash sales, no grain gambler could sell "short"; every sale of wheat would mesn the transfer of that much grain. No one could increase th. price by buying what he won't take, nor decrease it to the producer by selling what he hasn't got TELLS HOW WHEAT IN DEAL IN FUTURES ! By Basil M. Manly I By Special News Service. CHICAGO, June 21. "Futures." or I as they are more often called on the floor of the Minneapolis chamber of I commerce and Chicago board of trade, "options," are verbal or written contracts con-tracts to buy or sell, at some future time. ' For Instance. July wheat. One man on the floor near the July wheat pit, or acting through his commission man. buys 1000 bushels of July wheat at, say. 12.41 per bushel. He pays a small portion of the purchase price, called "margin." Th. seller contracts con-tracts to deliver to him 1000 bushels of whest In July. He csn deliver on the first day or any time to and Including In-cluding the last day of July. Th. buyer must take when delivered and pay the balance of the price over the margin he laid down at the beginning. Or a man may sell 1000 bushels of July wheat That doesn't necesasrily mean that he has even a single bushel to sell. This man is literally betting that wheat In July will be selling for less than the "future" price quoted today. If he guesses rightly, he csn buv inoo-busliels T!icnaiTT lower price and sell at the higher price he contracted at If wheat goes up by thst time, he of course loses the difference. dif-ference. September wheat Is that contracted for delivery in that month. At this time of the year speculators are dealing deal-ing in May. July and September wheat After June I May wheat Is dropped and December wheat Is added. Dealing In futures, commission men say. Is noccHwarvtoprotect termina elevator owners and floor miller: .that It gives these men a chanc to hedge on the market, which I. constantly' con-stantly' fluctuating But this much of grain .peculation, while It msy or msy not be necessary. neces-sary. Is only a minute part of the speculation in futures. To every legitimate le-gitimate future trade there are that are nothing but gambling or prearranged pre-arranged efforts to affect th. market price of cash grain. The average bushel of wheat Is sold at least 100 times on th. Minneapolis chamber of commerce. Every morning morn-ing there were, up to May II. more bushels of wheat sold In future trading trad-ing on the Chicago board of trade than there are bushels received during dur-ing the whole year. This Is grain gsmbllng betting on the rise or fall of the wheat. One man sells hundreds of thousands thou-sands of bushels of wheat he hasn't fot and which h. never expects to sve, to another man who doesn't wsnt thst wheat and never expects to get It That same mythical wheat is sold again and agattJurcIng the price up or doa-n. In the fall, whenfne farmers sr. hauling wheat to market, the price Is low. Why? Howl Look at September wheat today. It closed at 1 a bushel lower then May wheat. Why! Because In September Septem-ber the farmer will have wheat to sell. Today, only millers and big warehouse ware-house men have any. Along toward the time when wheat Is being threshed the milling trust and big grain buyers will begin selling September wheat. Then they don't buy. Continued selling sell-ing of any commodity naturally brings down the price. Just how many of these sales are "wash" affairs, no one but the "bears" (sellers, pulling down the price) know. A wash sale is no sale at all. It is made openly on the floor between Certain members mem-bers of abear crowd, and jfter the 'exchange closes' "Is washed off-Ihe slate. But wssh sales have a large effect upon the price. To outward signs, they are real sales. After the price is down and most farmers have marketed their wheat, the flour millers and grain cornerers. who have stored away millions of bushels In elevstors, begin boosting the price upwsrd. They have something some-thing to sell which they bought rheap and want to sell as dear as possible for s rofttThei then become