Hi Blargboy and welcome to share trading.Futures have various...

Hi Blargboy and welcome to share trading.

Futures have various definitions you can read about them in Wiki. For your question specifically, you are referring to Stock Index Futures you can have a read here.

For all intensive purposes for us novices we use the Futures to determine whether the markets will open up or down and how strong that movement is anticipated to be. The Index based futures is measured in the same was as if the market was open.

Two good Futures websites are:

1. Bloomberg

2. CNBC

There are many others...