Housing Hedges Hit The Big Time

Now trading on multiple exchanges, housing hedges are going to be mainstream. Expect to see much more about these contracts in the next year. This is a mention from the news letter of the brilliant Dennis Gartman who has forgotten more about trading than I'll know in a lifetime.

Simply put, the new futures market (which will trade
off-floor on the GLOBEX platform) will trade relative to an
index of property values put together over the past twenty
years by Professors "Chip" Case of Wellsely College and
Robert Schiller of Yale, known until earlier this week as the
Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Henceforth, however, with
the endorsement of Standard and Poors, the Index shall be
known as the S&P Case-Shiller Index. What Professors
Case and Shiller have done is measure, to the best of their
ability of the years, actual sales of houses in ten major
metropolitan market: Boston; Chicago; Denver; Las Vegas;
Los Angeles; Miami; New York; San Diego; San Francisco
and Washington D.C. [Ed. Note: Please, do not ask us
why the professors chose those markets, and why the
South seems to us to have been left out; and please do not
ask us any of the particulars of the markets chosen. Those
questions can be answered best by the CME's marketing
people.]. There will be a composite index upon which a
futures contract will trade, and there will be ten individual
futures markets on the component geographies involved.
The "spread" trading possibilities are obviously myriad.