On Thursday this week HedgeStreet will launch new real estate contracts for Boston, bringing the total number of available regional Housing Price Hedgelets to seven.
The Boston contract mirrors that of other HedgeStreet National Association of Realtors (NAR) based offerings. It will trade quarterly, be listed in a Binary Option format, and track the median price of single-family homes in the Boston metro area (Boston, Cambridge, and Quincy, Massachusetts as well as New Hampshire). HedgeStreet’s six other, previously listed housing markets include New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco.
HedgeStreet, an online derivatives exchange, was the first to offer this type of contract back in May 2005. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) begins trading housing futures today, nearly a year after HedgeStreet launched its first housing contracts.
In addition, a new currency contract, the USD/CAD, one of the world’s major currency pairs, was added to HedgeStreet’s existing Binary Options on Wednesday last week. The new USD/CAD contracts are offered in a Daily format and trade from 9am to 8pm ET.
HedgeStreet aims to cater to the everyday trader, and offers financial instruments in low, $10 increments so as to minimize the risk while allowing for profit opportunities. In contrast, the CME housing options have a contract size of tens of thousands of dollars.
In addition to real estate contracts, HedgeStreet offers a number of other unique binary options and capped futures in commodities (crude oil and gasoline), precious metals (gold, silver and copper) and currencies, as well as in new asset classes such as non-farm payrolls, CPI and the Fed Funds Rate.