Are there gnarly waves? You bet. But get ready for lots of flat water.

By John Thackray

The hype about the Internet, dude, got waaayy too much: so bad that every TV talking head and pundit, even my date's runny-nosed kid brother, was telling me the Web is the future, blah blah blah. Investors were trippy on the stuff all year - buying stocks they never heard of that claimed Internet-relatedness. But who knows? Netscape's IPO last summer was radical. The company sold stock worth hundreds of millions against no earnings and practically no sales, since they'd given away their main product. Other signs of mass delusion: 1) hundreds of bug-eyed venture capitalists looking for Web startups, checkbooks in their quivering hands, and 2) the US Vice President and Speaker of the House, normally blood enemies, cooing like doves and singing, "Let's Do It The Info-Way."

Cut to me at the terminal of my 486 clone, modem linked to a slip provider, then loading Netscape Navigator. "This is a reality check," I said. "I want something more than porno with lousy pixels, chat forums for Pogo comic strip fans, or screamin' corporate-home-page billboards. The Net's gotta be more than a hobby thing. It's gotta be useful. And what better use than to benefit my derivatives trading?" And one more criterion: everything must be free.

What's on the Following Pages?

I'm talking here mostly about useful, likable sites. Scores of totally dumb, pathetic and infuriating pages have ended up on the cutting room floor. I avoided sites that were loaded only with public relations and huckstering. Don't think that my hits amount to a guide to derivatives on the Net. No way: the scene is morphing too quickly. Also searches are quirky. Chance plays a big role as one skips through directories of derivatives sites and somersaults from one hyperlink to the next. A few different turns at certain crossroads, some different search engines, and the outcome might have been different.

Learning the Net-Ropes

All the hype about the Net has obscured the fact that it is basically a primitive and sometimes unreliable technology. The slip providers that give you access to the Net vary greatly in quality and dependability. One of the worst, in my experience, was America OnLine, where traffic is continually slowed by system bottlenecks and overloads. AOL will cut you off the Net without warning. Imagine eating in a restaurant and being told by the maitre d', "Okay, folks, you gotta leave-we're out of food." Even with a good slip provider, the Net's responsiveness is likely to vary greatly at different times of day and with different destinations.

Home pages overloaded with graphics are another major cause of frustration. You can waste a lot of time staring at the browser's page-for most of us that's the Netscape logo of shooting stars indicating a retrieval taking place. Here's a tip: ration your Web sessions. Keep a log of starting and finishing times and of sites visited-it's easy to forget where you've been. And of course places you might want to return to should be bookmarked.

After the initial cruising of this mapless environment-the part that is supposed to be fun-there comes the time to be rigorous in defining a session's objectives. If not, you'll find yourself led, or hyperlinked, into sites that may be interesting in a ho-hum way but are far from your initial objectives.

Some of the major shapers of Net reality are the search engines, which allow you to hunt for particular words or phrases and which vary greatly in their character, economics and user-efficiency. It is important to ask: whose interest does this engine serve? Some of them are disinterested and maintained as a public service, while other engines-Lycos and Yahoo, for instance-are commercial ventures whose agenda is to generate income by funneling Net users to fee-based information or advice. Note also that engines easily mix up different orders of information. One search on Yahoo under derivatives yielded a straightforward bit of corporate self-promotion by Philbro. The next item was the home page of an Italian derivatives trader working for a bank in Luxembourg!

Caution is also in order with directories of "other useful sites." While these road signs are ubiquitous, they vary greatly in usefulness, and few are maintained with great quality control, timeliness or research. Case in point: derivatives searches on several engines will turn up the University of Gottingen's economics department. But the list of sites gathered by the folks in Gottingen suggests they're a little out of touch with the United States.

Getting Your Bearings

Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com/

Okay, let's start with Yahoo, the popular search engine. It yields a score of items to my query on derivatives-an assortment of Web sites from listed exchanges, futures brokers and academics, and online news, views and data. No way of knowing what's gold and what's dross. Aha! Here's something interesting: a hotwire to "How to Become a Realtime Commodity Future Trader-From Home," which Yahoo says is a "popular startup to advanced realtime trading guides for beginner and expert." I click there and feel like a fool. I'm looking at a promo and order form for a self-published book at $69.99. That's lesson number one: search engines have no quality control.

NumaWeb
http://www.numa.com/derivs/drivex.htm

Gee, can there really be a derivatives supermarket? London-based NumaWeb has a treasure trove of really deep data on derivatives courses, upcoming conferences (though 90 percent are in the United Kingdom), a directory of software vendors, a mail order for books with a pretty respectable list of authors, plus an online mini expert system that teaches derivatives strategies. These consist of 17 strategies for different market environments-bullish, neutral, volatile, etc.-that are well-diagrammed and backed up with good text. It also has a dictionary with 200 derivatives acronyms and a "laboratory" that offers an array of calculators for options, convertible bonds and warrants. These are supported with good descriptions of how the calculators work and their input and output data. There's also an okay article on the credit risks attached to equity options. Whoever these Numa people are, they get my BN Award-for Benefactor of the Net. My only criticism is a zine called "Voila! Tillity" addicted to stale Nick Leeson jokes and British public school humor.

Waldemar's List
http://www.cosm.sc.edu/~puszkarz/futures.asp

If there is one primo net directory for futures, this is it! Since March 1995 Waldemar Puszkarz, a Pole, 35, bas built this minor edifice while working toward his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of South Carolina. Probably the first Web site on futures, it is updated on weekends-hits run to nearly 2,000 monthly. The encyclopedic material has hotwires to: 1) exchanges; 2) advisory services, clearing houses and brokers; 3) investment companies; 4) charts, quotes and archives; 5) market reports and commentary; 6) trading; 7) traders' home pages. In all, the list runs to four typewritten pages, and still (because this is the Net) it is incomplete. Via e-mail Waldemar says that, alas, he's too busy at school to trade.

Finlink
http://Wat.ch/finlink/home.htm

This site is run by the Geneva-based International Finance & Commodities Institute (IFCI) with support from Axone, a local software company, and the Geneva stock exchange. IFCI is in the business of derivatives training on contract to large institutions. IFCI also runs classrooms open to the public on 30 derivatives subjects in six languages. (Am I ready for spring in Geneva on the shores of beautiful Lac Léman?)

Here you'll also find a full-text collection of five learned articles on why derivatives are good for humanity. Axone offers an interactive calculator for the premium and all risk factors (delta, gamma, theta, vega, rho) for European and American FX options. In slightly weird English they say: "You will also have the possibility to download a free Windows version that you can freely distribute." That's shareware, baby. Axone's most original item is a multilingual financial glossary. And it does a lot more than simple word-for-word matches between English, French, Italian and German. I put in the word "call" as search term and out came several explanations in the language of choice of a dozen different call-based strategies. Want to know the Italian for "naked position," "bull call spread," "strangle"? Here it is. Lastly this site has a well-structured directory of Web sites, broken up into such topics as charts/quotes, currencies, mutual funds and training. IFCI's pages combine state-of-the-art technology with a pleasing low-key design. Since the page went up in mid-1995 there have more than 100,000 hits a month-a number that is sure to grow rapidly.

High-Tech Data

BARRA
http://www.barra.com/

BARRA is a Top Gun in mathematical equity research. In its Market/Index section it provides loads of background and price data on several popular indices: the S&P 500/BARRA Growth and Value, BARRA Canadian, BARRA's All-US. There is data too on different betas (historical and predicted) of the Dow Jones Industrials-with comparisons to their industry group-plus many pages of discussion and definition of terms. There are also volatility indices for all emerging markets, including some wild volatility scores for places like Jordan, Korea and Greece.

Prof. William Sharpe
http://gsb-www.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/ home.asp

Few of the major derivatives directories list this site. But students of equity investing will immediately recognize the name of William F. Sharpe, inventor of the Sharpe Ratio, one of the most widely used tools in equity performance measurement. The first benefit of a visit is pix of the prof on the opening page, plus a list of publications (sorry, not available online) and a place for e-mailed comments and suggestions. Then the heavy stuff begins. Macro-investment analysis: 1) an overview of the domain covered; 2) principles and techniques (designed to grow into something akin to a textbook); 3) empirical analysis; 4) programs, procedures, functions and spreadsheets in various languages designed to implement key principles. There's more than 20 pages, heavy with mathematics.

Wow and wow again! This is like having a hotwire into the prof's mind. I wonder if the dean at Stanford, where Sharpe teaches, is aware that the professor is giving so much for free? Turns out he's not the only one. Professor Don Chance at Virginia Tech has a site called Derivatives 'R Us (http://www.vt.edu:10021/business/Finance/dmc/DRU). With occasional flashes of humor it offers almost a full-length book, a graduate-level introduction to derivatives, each chapter a downloadable file. I wonder if he's told his publisher that it's been a Net freebie for many months. It is easy to get the suspicion that the Net is morphing the economic structure of many things.

Robert's Online Pricers
http://www.intrepid.com/ ~robertl/author.asp

There is a polarized ethic on the net: those who've got huge dollar signs in their eyeballs vs. those like Dr. Robert Lum who think, what the hell, let's just give back something to the world. His pricing models are open to one and all, and offer a wide range of choices.

P.S. Via e-mail the professor tells us that his pricers attract about 11,000 hits daily. That's an amazing number of people who regularly unglue themselves from far sexier sites to get an asset valuation. Even more amazing, some of the frequent users come from locations where they are sitting within a few feet of some of the most powerful valuation models known to man-Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan for instance. One pricer that piqued my interest was on brokerage commissions. The difference between the cheapest and the dearest is one reason to check this page regularly.

JP Morgan
http://www.jpmorgan.com/

Two or three years ago nobody could have imagined that there would be so many giveaways of first-rate information as we see on the Net today. In derivatives the outstanding example of the Net-driven revolution is of course JP Morgan's RiskMetrics global market risk system, which has proven a rousing success. There is also good supporting material, such as upcoming conferences when JP Morgan personnel will be talking about RiskMetrics and lists of software developers and consultants who are qualified to support an implementation. When the history of the Net comes to be written, RiskMetrics will stand out as a seminal moment because it sets a bogey for rivals. There are reports in the investment community that major free data offerings on this scale will soon be offered by other firms.

Zero Delta Analytics
http://cnct.com/home/myers/ZeroDelta.htm

While media powerhouses are making billion-dollar deals and counterdeals over the Net, it is still predominantly a cottage industry. Meet one derivatives cottager, Kurt Myers, whose Zero Delta Analytics offers its "first shareware product available for distribution, which is a dynamic link library for calculating options prices using the basic Black-Scholes option pricing formula. Also present is a function for calculating cumulative normal probabilities (which some may find more useful than the option pricing algorithm...) It runs under Windows 3.1 and can be linked to Excel and compiled in C/C++."

Who knows? Could be terrible, could be wonderful. Kurt says nothing about his background or qualifications, but a hotwire to a personal home page shows him out for a day in the country with his wife Angie, a lover of pre-Colombian jewelry. He looks like a nice guy.

Time Wasters

Iowa Electronic Markets
http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/

The Iowa Electronics Markets (IEM) is one of the more curious corners of the net. It's a genuine all-electronic futures exchange that allows anyone to make bets-and lose real money-on real outcomes.

These days the site's hottest contract hangs on the outcome of the Republican race for the Presidential nomination. After registering and sending IEM a deposit check, the investor bets via an electronic trading screen that displays three-month prices on a beautiful five-color chart, or a spreadsheet with bid, asked, last, low, high and average. At 11:54 on February 13, for example, the asking price on the Republican Convention Market for an option on Dole's candidacy was $0.579, compared to $0.155 for Lamar Alexander and $0.092 for Steve Forbes. Since last May when his prices gained 30 percent and Gramm's dropped by an equivalent amount, Dole has been a hot favorite-only dipping a little, and then recovering against Forbes's insurgency by mid-February. The maximum size trading portfolio is $500.00, the minimum, $5.00.

Its creators at the University of Iowa College of Business Administration argue that the justification for this futures market-aside from its use as a teaching tool-is that it is a more accurate predictor of electoral outcomes. In real polls, they say, voters don't have any incentive to tell the truth, but investors in their winner-take-all pool do. As for real life traders, maybe this is the place to take a break from porkbellies or FX futures.

There are around 4,000 players and numbers are growing fast. Other IEM markets allow you to bet on the direction of a basket of computer stocks or on upcoming elections in British Columbia and Austria.

Yes, you read that right. Austria. You got a problem with that?

Newsgroups
news:misc.invest.futures

Newsgroups used to be the heart of the Internet-the gathering place of enthusiasts, hobbyists and specialists in thousands of different topics. To the sophisticated and the initiated, the value of the groups depended on who was there.

Well, sad to say, the only derivatives-based newsgroup is like a bad cocktail party-all kinds of people you don't want to meet. Well, not entirely: there is the slim possibility that the one interesting-looking person you've not talked to may turn out to be the Albert Einstein of Futures. But don't count on it.

The real creeps are the growing number of hustlers using this medium to peddle their web pages urging individuals to part with money for trading systems, newsletters, tip sheets and other offers you can't refuse. These wires to commercial home pages now comprise about three quarters of all entries. Example: "Re: 40% Return/Yr Guaranteed-Free $100 Report-Free-Seth Jackson." Occasionally an individual will stray into the group with a genuine question, or issue, but he'll be lucky to spark a discussion or even get an intelligent response.

Economics

One of the boons of the Net is that it greatly expands an individual's sources of information. For instance, a dealer at a bank can use it to find different, perhaps better, ideas than those that come from the bank's economist. And for corporate or institutional end-users whose companies have eliminated in-house economists, here is a chance to access a rich array of expert opinion on trends and fundamentals. Check out the two we describe, and if you want others browse in FinWeb (http://www.finweb.com/).

Morgan Stanley
http://www.ms.com/GEF/index.asp

Morgan Stanley's Global Economic Forum is a daily report from the firm's entire economic team-including top Street economist Stephen Roach-calling in from all the major financial centers. The writing is good, the coverage amazingly broad. This high-level research, once restricted to institutional customers, is available in real time (not yesterday's or last week's sample archive). Pretty far out! Another BN (Benefactor of the Net) Award to Morgan Stanley.

Deutschebank
http://www.webcom.com/~yardeni/economic.asp

Ed Yardeni, chief economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell/C.J. Lawrence, is another long-time Wall Street figure with a strong following. Although the material available to non-clients is far less than that from Morgan Stanley's economists, his views and interpretations are substantially open to Net users. His economic indicators segment is also kept up to date, and there is an online chart room with graphics on inflation, the economy and financial markets. Yardeni offers downloads of the last four Federal Reserve Open Market Committee Meetings minutes, samples of Greenspan testimony before Congress, the Fed Beige Book of Regional Economic Conditions and links to forecasts from other sources around the globe.

Daiwa
http://www.dir.co.jp/

Investors in global markets can clearly use the Net to augment the data and commentary they're already exposed to. The Daiwa Research Institute site has clear and concise reporting on local economic conditions, stock market and liquidity prospects and coming structural changes in the Japanese economy. There is even a short essay on the adequacy of Japan's information infrastructure. There are excellent up-to-date reports and latest-month data on the Daiwa Bond, CB and Warrant Index backed up by colorful charts.

Nomura (http://www.nri.co.jp/) and Nikko (http://www.nikko.co.jp/) also have Net pages, and Sumitomo Bank Capital Markets in New York is reportedly preparing a site strictly for derivatives.

'Zine

Applied Futures and Trading
http://ww2.hyperlink.com/aft

A zine, as every dude knows, is a digital magazine like the megapopular HotWired. And yes, derivatives has its own zine as well: Applied Futures & Trading. Opening pitch: "For those who are brokers, traders or curious about futures then AFT is for you. Fawning advertorial is not for us. Practical news, reviews, trading analysis is." The writer, editor Patrick Young, is one straight-talking Brit. The zine is small but delivers real value. Contents of the second issue are a cute news item on the post-Leeson use of psychological honesty testing at Barings, an intelligent commentary on the Daiwa scandal and the habit of traders at Japanese banks of losing trading slips in the bottom drawer, plus good software and book reviews. There is something for hard-headed quants, too-a 2,000-word essay with charts on "A New Approach to Momentum Trading" by Juliette Clark, a trader at the Bank of Scotland, which was published originally in the UK Society of Technical Analysis Journal. Ms. Clark explains a method of measuring momentum and combines it with a Bollinger band to generate trading and hedging signals.

Foreign Exchange

There is an abundance of FX data on the net, ranging from simple end-of-day currency conversions to more high-powered and computer-driven models. In the latter category we've picked two:

Forex Watch
http://www.forex.co.uk/fxwatch/info.htm

Every five minutes Forex Watch updates four US dollar and three cross-rate pairs, along with minor and major support and resistance levels for each-generally a break from one level means it is headed for the next. There are also 15- and 30-hour moving averages, which are updated during the day, and bar, candlestick and technical charts. There is a bulletin board with a running market commentary (one per half hour is the goal) and trading ideas, a market overview, etc. Finally there is a trading systems page for short-, medium- and long-term trades whose spreadsheet is continually updated with the up and down trends pulsing in bold letters. Conclusion: Forex Watch gives good value.

Olsen & Associates
http://www.olsen.ch/foreign/websvcs.asp

Olsen & Associates operates a real-time FX decision support system for 84 currencies on a 24-hour cycle. After a no-cost and no-obligation registration, you can get access to forecasting of directional moves, historical analysis as a timing tool (to open and close positions), plus trading models that crank out specific recommendations. Olsen arrives at a neat balance between useful free information and a richer, fully supported proprietary product. The Zurich-based firm has an impressive list of published papers, and its gurus have worked on some pretty far-out stuff, like fractal approaches, time deformation and a heterogeneous market hypothesis that looks at different yet rational expectations of players. At least a dozen articles on these and other topics can be viewed or printed out. So can the output of several US-dollar-based currency models.

Futures Data

More than a handful of futures brokers offer an array of good statistical information that they obtain from listed exchange data feeds. Here are a few.

FutureLook
http://www.wp.com/futurelook/

FutureLook presents time-delayed and (if you sign the guest-book) real-time intra-day charts on six major financial futures markets, each with very good five-minute charts of sterling, deutsche marks, yen, Swiss francs and the S&P 500. The system was developed to provide early warning and price-risk management for investors. There is an excellent FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section explaining the use of the analysis.

Jack Carl
http://jackcarl.com/

Jack Carl Futures offers a full range of daily settlement prices on more than 30 active futures contracts. Its two market reports (daily and overnight) cover financials, agriculturals, coffee and energies. It looks pretty good, as does a calendar of upcoming economic events.

STA
http://wsi.smgi.com/sta/

STA, a commodity futures and options broker, offers free subscriptions to a weekly economic report. But its best deal is access to special economic reports, usually in chart or tabular form. This is a great place to get recent statistics on the National Association of Purchasing Managers, consumer confidence, consumer prices, housing starts, capacity utilization, inflation and other indicators-all just a mouse-click away.

Prophet
http://www.prophetdata.com/

Prophet Information Services offers hundreds of daily updated and back-adjusted futures black-and-white charts from 1959 onward. They cover bonds, currencies, energies, indices, foods and grains, meats, industrial and metals, and UK and other foreign markets. More specific data for spreadsheet writing on 37 different futures markets is available with an end-of-modem hookup for a modest fee.

FSA
http://www.netaxs.com/~fsa/home.asp

Futures Software Associates presents spreadsheet performance summaries of a score of money managers and funds, plus a free introductory subscription to a futures market newsletter. Best of all is one of the most thorough links to other sites of interest to futures traders and investors in derivatives.

Government

The main Federal Reserve has only dusty archival stuff to download, nothing quick and immediate. But its deficiencies are made up by some of the district Feds. The Federal Reserve of Minneapolis (http://woodrow. mply.frb.fed.us/economy/index.asp) offers the Beige Book-which contains national economic summaries, selected interest and exchange rate charts in color, plus industrial and money supply data. Economic forecasting is the strong suit of the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia (http://www.libertynet.org/~fedresrv/), home of the Livingston Survey of Economists and the Survey of Professional Forecasters. From a trading standpoint an excellent site was the Chicago Fed (gopher://gopher.greatlakes.net:2200/11/partners/ChicagoFed/finance), a site that has a plethora of daily quotes on CDs, commercial paper, corporate bond yields, Eurodollar deposits, FX, money supply, etc.

The two regulatory bodies affecting derivatives have pages that I'd grade B-. The SEC (http://www.sec.gov/) is standard fare: annual reports, enforcement actions, speeches by top brass, press releases, new regulations and the unique link to its EDGAR data base of corporate 10-K filings. A similar table of contents is available at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) (http://www.clark.net/pub/cftc) with a little more emphasis on enforcement actions. This site also boasts a pretty good publications and reports section, which includes summaries of no-action letters and weekly advisories. Fannie Mae (http://www.fanniemae.com/) has a little more current data on the housing and mortgage markets, and various regional outlooks for 1996. It has some good explanations of risk and returns on collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO) investing.

Listed Exchanges

Surfin' aficionados of futures and options soon learn that the listed exchanges are some of the more concrete places one can visit. Granted their pages are not without occasional puffery and phony virtuality, but by and large these are islands of credibility in a cyberspace that, in many parts, is awash with trivia and junk. The characteristics of these sites follow a pattern. After the logo scrolls by, with sometimes painful slowness, there are typically click-on boxes for: (1) exchange history; (2) contract specs; (3) recent press releases; (4) a lineup of exchange personnel; (5) other sites of interest; (6) statistics. However, there are many ways to skin a web site, which can be seen in the following sketch of their differences.

American Stock Exchange
http://www.amex.com/

Here the derivatives focus is on options on traded index baskets, with special fanfare for the three-month old Inter@ctive Week Internet Index-including a chart backcasting the index to early 1994, plus a list of its component net companies. More information is available via links to Investors Advantage (www.shares.com) that gives 15-minute delayed quotes on all stocks in this index, plus their 10-K filings. Investors Advantage publishes a handful of online brokerage reports covering components of the index. Soon this will be the place anyone can e-mail some high powered academics and Street gurus (photos and bios provided) with questions about options strategies and the Internet. Net-hype aside, this exchange confines option market quotations to end-of-day total market statistics, plus closing prices on three different series of individual company puts and calls: the Amex 10, 15 and 25 most active series.

Bolsa Brasileira de Futuros
http://www.embrate.net.br/infoserv/bbf/index.asp

Exchange history and contracts traded. Trading statistics coming soon.

Chicago Board Options Exchange
http://www.cboe.com/

Education seems to be the main mission of the CBOE on the net. The home page is wired to a demo of its Options Toolbox, an educational software program, and also to the site for its Options Institute, plus an Understanding Options section. A "What's New" section has data on LEAP seminars around the country. By the standards of some rival exchanges, CBOE's trading data is minimal. It is limited to day-end data totalled for all products, with breakdowns for all equity LEAPs, and its primary market indices like the S&P 100, 500, 500 LEAPs, FT-SE, Russell 2000, Nasdaq 100, plus a variety of sector ones. There is no data on individual equity options. A site called The Virtual Visit is a disappointing collection of fuzzy, small stills of the trading floor.

Chicago Board of Trade
http://www.cbot.com/

Among the best CBOT offerings are ten-minute delayed quotes (day and evening sessions), daily reports, financial and agricultural calendars, settlement prices and catastophe insurance options data. In a sponsor section called MarketPlex there is an impressive array of freebies from various sources like the US Department of Agriculture, the Managed Futures Association and Knight Ritter. We sampled two and they were good: CHARTWATCH and Griggs & Santow. The former contained research reports and charts (complimentary for the present) on Treasuries, Eurodollars, deutsche marks, Swiss francs, Japanese yen, sterling and the S&P 500. Also thrown in: various currency trading models. A sample of Griggs & Santrow's Trade Talk, covering a Chinese-restaurant-size menu of choice topics, seemed solid stuff. Surfers with lottsa time to waste might try the CBT's tedious virtual reality software download, but after five minutes we quit.

Chicago Mercantile Exchange
http://www.cme.com/

Technically this is one of the most advanced offerings of any exchange on the Net. After opening videos of the market, there is a good cache of statistics including historical volume and open interest charts, membership prices and ten-minute time-delayed quotes from the floor. A flash quote service is updated every 10 minutes for most futures contracts and every 15 minutes for agricultural and financial products. All daily settlement prices on agriculturals go up at 2:00 p.m., currency and interest rate contracts by 3:00 p.m., the rest by 4:30. Also on GLOBEX after-hours trading there is a ten-minute delayed update. Here, too, one can find the Associated Press' wrap-up of grain and livestock market activity.

Coffee Sugar & Cocoa Exchange
http://www.csce.com/

Intra-day futures contract prices are provided via Quote Watch for coffee, cocoa, sugar, cheese and milk contracts. Via a hook-up with INO, there are intra-day, daily and weekly charts on CSCE contracts. The exchange's most intriguing offer: a download of SOFTSwareTM, an "interactive options strategy software for beginners and experts alike" in English or Spanish. There are plans to add Japanese and Portuguese soon.

Hong Kong Futures Exchange
http://www.hkfe.com/

Pretty minimal page, but it has nice graphics: pie and bar charts showing trading growth and distribution of investors.

Kansas City Board of Trade
http://www.kcbt.com/

Daily price summary information on natural gas, wheat and Value Line futures and options contracts. A sub-site that is unique: "How to find the perfect Kansas City restaurant." One criticism this exchange is the only one that provides archival trading data offline, and for money. It comes in a $35 disk.

London International Financial Futures Exchange
http://www.liffe.com/

Arguably the largest mother lode of on-line data from any options and futures exchange. Here, for example, is the lineup of statistics: 1) contract records in table form; 2) volume and open interest charts; 3) time and sales (tick-by-tick data); 4) end-of-day price histories; 5) daily information sheets; 6) settlement prices. In addition, the publications section has extensive coverage of articles and periodicals on interest rate products, equity products and technology. A handful of the articles are online. LIFFE also has a Net data feed with settlement data that can be integrated into a PC-based system. Although the exchange claims this service is not intended to replace its standard method of data distribution, for some users it could be a good substitute.

Minneapolis Grain Exchange
http://www.mgex.com/

A small but well-designed page for punters in wheat and shrimp. In the "What's New" section, the MGE has a hotwire to INO's MarketVoice in RealAudio. If you want to hear pundits' scratchy voices through your computer, talking about stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, energy and metal, and financial futures, this may be an offer you can't refuse. So, too, might be the exchange's heavy sales pitch for buying the cheapest seat in the world, at $13,500.

MATIF
http://www.matif.fr/

(Marché à Terme International de France)

Good boilerplate stuff on GLOBEX, which MATIF uses along with the CME. Current trading statistics are sparse. There are data tables only for the latest month-sometimes weeks late-all of 1995 and historical activity. Downloadable archival material on contracts, trades and prices are also available.

MEFF RENTA FIJA
http://www.meff.com.es/

This site was outstanding for its slowness of access, and tepid hotwires. This Spanish fixed-income and financial futures and options exchange-the fastest-growing in the world, they say-offers educational material on local interest rate markets. Statistics include latest end-of-day data on government bond and MIBOR futures. Files of historical data are also available.

New York Cotton Exchange
http://www.nyce.com/

A sparse but effective home page with intra-day data on citrus, cotton, FINEX and NYFE contracts. Historical data can be downloaded and unzipped.

New York Mercantile Exchange
http://www.nymex.com/

Black-and-white pages have an austere look. There is an "audio welcome" (requiring RealAudio) on the home page. Statistics on energy, financials (Eurotop 100) and metals provided via INO and S&P COMSTOCK feature intra-day, daily and weekly spreadsheets and charts. Other offerings: file downloads for on-line natural gas trading via Channel 4, and NYMEX's after-hours electronic global trading system.

OM Group
http://www.omgroup.com/

This electronically linked marketplace links OM Stockholm and the London Securities & Derivatives Exchange via OM CLICK technology. Aside from the usual background on contracts and trading volumes (yesterday's quotes on various equity options contracts) there is a free online educational program with fictitious option trading capabilities.

Philadelphia Stock Exchange
http://www.libertynet.org/~phlx/

This a pretty static site, lacking end-of-day or time-delayed quotes. There are colorful 50/150-day moving average charts of various PHLX sector indexes. The site also offers "The Dorsey Reports," a regular in-depth commentary with trading ideas (sample available) for securities professionals who make contact via e-mail. One unusual feature: hotwires to several business school sites.

How Useful is the Net?

Now let's tackle the $64,000 question: how useful is the Net to someone in derivatives? That depends on where he or she is sitting. Much of the trading data on the Net will have little appeal to someone at a Wall Street derivatives desk (where it's 100 percent better and in real time). A graduate student in finance, however, may find it invaluable. The same is true of online mathematical engines like NumaWeb or Robert's Option Pricers: they may be very low-tech for Wall Street, but clearly serve some of the needs of academics and corporate/institutional end-users.

Even seasoned pros who are steeped in data and bombarded with economic assessments and forecasts every day can use the Net to explore and probe for new knowledge of markets, instruments and exchanges. To be sure, it is unlikely they will experience that moment of inspiration where they see "THIS IS SIGNIFICANT" before them in blinding lights, but they will probably find that knowledge of the world and of markets will be deeper and richer and keener.

My quest in derivatives has taught me one thing, however: as the Net expands from its small base of academics and newsgroups it continues to preserve its characteristic openness even in the commercial world of derivatives. Rudyard Kipling said, "It is better to travel than to arrive." That's true even on the Net. You need to believe in the journey, the quest, to relish the idea that these early days on the Net are the start of a world-transforming phenomenon-and go on believing it even when a session's immediate returns seem barren.

Okay, piece by piece the information I accessed was not overwhelmingly significant. Cumulatively it is a tremendous equalizer. I feel smarter and hipper. I'm glad I made the trip.