HedgeStreet

HedgeStreet is the first Internet based, government regulated market where traders hedge against or speculate on economic events and price movements. Hedge Street significantly expands investment, risk-hedging, and profit-making opportunities available to traders at all levels:
HedgeStreet's site enables members to trade small, inexpensive, easy-to-understand "event derivative" contracts in markets never before accessible to individual traders.

HedgeStreet offers its members profit opportunities and strategies as well as more cost efficient and direct hedging mechanisms. Leveraging the Internet, a highly efficient trading platform, and expert financial instrument designers, HedgeStreet offers a variety of contracts necessary to empower private individuals to manage particular risks they face. HedgeStreet's contracts span a range of markets, from commodities and currencies to economic indicators, employment, fuel, housing prices, inflation, and interest and mortgage rates. HedgeStreet members have access to a complete trading system including order entry, market depth, historical data services, cash accounting, and position reporting.

HedgeStreet aims to create the first true retail market for derivatives, where investors can use awareness to their advantage. Though most investors might be unfamiliar with derivatives, familiarity is not necessarily an impediment in understanding these new markets and investment opportunities proposed by HedgeStreet

HedgeStreet is a secure, fully-transparent marketplace, based in San Mateo, California, a company subject to regulatory oversight by a Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Membership is only open to people residing in the U.S.

What makes HedgeStreet's instruments unique is they do not exist in any other financial exchanges today, and if they did, chances are only investors reside within the institutional Wall Street firms would have access to them. Because HedgeStreet is specifically a retail derivatives exchange, its contract sizes reflect the modest financial requirements expected of its trading members. In other words, it's an eminently affordable way to trade derivatives.

Derivatives are financial instruments that have no intrinsic value, but derive their value from something else. They hedge the risk of owning things that are subject to unexpected price fluctuations, e.g. foreign currencies, bushels of wheat, stocks and government bonds. There are two main types: futures, or contracts for future delivery at a specified price, and options that give one party the opportunity to buy from or sell to the other side at a prearranged price.

If there were a further example of just how popular and widespread such retail derivatives markets could become, it might be Korea's Kospi 200 Index, which trades more than any other index in the world. This small retail-oriented index now has 15 times the trading volume of the Nikkei 225 Futures and Options, and is three times larger than the S&P 500. With more than 60 percent of traders in the index representing retail traders, the Kospi 200 Index offers an example of the potential size a retail-oriented derivatives exchange could achieve

HedgeStreet, Inc.
P.O. Box 5861
San Mateo, CA 94402-5861
www.hedgestreet.com

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