FUTURES 327 



passing of the warehouse receipt from office to office. Thus, deHveries 

 that would involve immense sums of money and two or three days 

 time are consummated in forty-five minutes by paying for the property 

 once. 



After the first delivery day, deliveries can be made by warehouse 

 receipts from office to office each morning, but in the afternoon of 

 each business day, deliveries are made by notice in the Exchange Hall, 

 the same as on the morning of the first business day of the month. 

 The delivery notice is a complete description of the receipts and the 

 contract on which they are to bo delivered. Any person to whom the 

 notice is delivered can procure the receipts by holding the notice and 

 sending a check for the value of the commodity to the party issuing 

 the notice. Every notice is back to the office of the issuer within an 

 hour after deliveries close, accompanied by a certified check, and the 

 warehouse receipts are surrendered to the party thus paying for them. 



The volume of these deliveries is at times beyond comprehension. 

 In -making an investigation of one lot of 1,200,000 bushels of wheat, 

 sent out by a ttrm on notice, it was found that the 240 notices of 

 5,000 bushels each had passed through an average of twenty hands 

 before they finally lodged and were paid. Thus, contracts for 24,000,- 

 000 bushels of wheat were settled by delivery of this lot of wheat in 

 forty-five minutes (the delivery runs from 8:30 to 9:15 A. M.). 



As there were between five and ten millions of bushels of grain 

 delivered that morning, the contracts settled by delivery were evi- 

 dently between one hundred and two hundred million bushels. If 

 that volume of business had been carried from office to office, it 

 would have involved much time, labor, expense and delay, all unneces- 

 sary. Every person receiving the notice had absolute control of the 

 disposition of the warehouse receipts during the time the notice was 

 in his hands; for it passes from hand to hand and can be stopped by 

 any party who receives it. 



Settlements, and Settlement and Delivery Prices. Contracts set- 

 tled for the reason that delivery is unnecessary, must be uniform in 

 all respects. If only two parties are involved, the settlement is very 

 simple ;, the one having a loss in the transaction, pays it to the other 

 who has a profit. But when more than two parties are involved, the 

 collecting of profits and payment of losses are more complicated and 

 difficult of explanation, although diiifering not the least in princi-ple. 

 The parties having losses pay, and the parties having profits collect 



