METHODOLOGY

The Model: Cost of Carry

Cost of carry relates the futures price to the current cash value through financing, dividends and time to expiry. Removing that carry gives an index-equivalent price implied by the future:

Rearranging to solve for the implied spot price given today's futures price :

Start with a future at 6,000 and a cash reference of 5,970. Assume a 4% annual financing rate, a 1.5% annual dividend yield and 30 calendar days until the quoted contract expires.

1. 01

   Convert the inputs

   r = 0.04 · q = 0.015
   t = 30 / 365.25

   Rates enter as decimals. Carry accrues over calendar time; the 252-trading-day convention belongs to the volatility calculation.

2. 02

   Remove net carry

   r − q = 2.5%

   Financing exceeds dividends, so the implied cash value is below the futures price. This adjustment is not the predicted market move.

3. 03

   Calculate fair value

   5,987.69

   Discount the future using the exponential formula above. Keep full precision until the displayed result is rounded.

4. 04

   Compare with cash

   +17.69 · +0.30%

   The implied move compares fair value with the cash reference, not the futures contract’s own previous settlement.

Holding the future fixed, a higher financing rate lowers implied cash value; a higher dividend yield raises it. As expiry approaches, the carry adjustment shrinks.

Stocks & commodities

Inputs

Expiration Schedules

The expiry must belong to the contract whose price is quoted. A front-month symbol can roll to a new contract before the old one expires; pairing the new price with the old expiry can create an artificial jump.

Data Sources

Data is cached server-side for 60 seconds and streamed to clients via Server-Sent Events. Quotes may be delayed by up to 15 minutes depending on the provider.

Reading the terminal

Before a cash session, the headline is the implied open for the displayed session date. During that session it is current fair value. After the close, the date advances to the next trading session using the venue calendar. Stocks show the appropriate regular or extended-hours quote instead of a carry-model prediction.

The solid chart is price history; supported futures overlays are rebased to the cash index and are not actual cash trades. The dashed cyan segment leads to the current fair-value estimate, not a time-path forecast. Shaded bands identify session gaps and lunch breaks; the volatility cone is an indicative daily one-sigma range, not a calibrated opening-error interval.

Stream connection, quote age and chart freshness are independent. A failed chart refresh retains its last validated bars with a warning and last-bar date. Market inputs identifies fixed fallback yields by tenor, and calculation details preserves source names and timestamps on every screen size.

Volatility Cone (1σ Range)

Alongside each implied opening price, we display a one-standard-deviation daily range derived from that market's own 30-day implied-volatility index. Each index expresses annualised implied volatility as a percentage; converting to a daily dollar move:

where is the implied opening price computed by the cost-of-carry model, and the volatility index is expressed as a decimal (e.g. 18 → 0.18). The resulting range gives a rough sense of overnight uncertainty baked into options markets. Each card uses its own exchange's vol index rather than a single proxy — the US indices use the CBOE VIX, while international cards use their native equivalents: VKOSPI (KOSPI 200), TAIWAN VIX (TAIEX), the Nikkei 225 VI, VHSI (Hang Seng), VDAX-NEW (DAX) and VFTSE (FTSE 100). Where a native index is unavailable, the card falls back to the US VIX.

Accuracy Tracker

Each index is predicted in its own venue's pre-open window and scored against that session's actual open — so London, Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Frankfurt and New York are each measured against their own open, not a single US clock. The miss is recorded as a percentage:

Common questions

Measured futures basis (Shadow Model)

The carry model above treats dividends as a smooth annual yield . Real index futures on price-return venues discount discrete dividend points concentrated in ex-dividend seasons — Taiwan's Jul–Aug cluster puts the post-July-roll TAIEX contract roughly 2% below cash, Hong Kong's H-share season runs May–Aug, Japan clusters in Mar/Sep, and the UK has interim seasons worth ~10–25 bp — which a continuous yield structurally cannot express. To measure that gap we also run a second model: record the observed basis at each venue's cash close (same futures source, both prints required to be seconds-fresh so a frozen feed can never be recorded), then at the next pre-open convert the live future through it, . The observed basis absorbs the discrete dividend discount exactly and re-anchors itself on the new contract after every roll (on the roll day itself, and whenever no fresh anchor exists — first day, an aged observation beyond three sessions — the model falls back to the standard carry calculation).

Status: shadow. Anchored predictions are currently logged in the accuracy tracker alongside the headline carry predictions for FTSE 100, Nikkei 225, Hang Seng, KOSPI 200 and TAIEX — every displayed implied open and every headline accuracy number on this site remains the pure cost-of-carry model until a venue's shadow error record proves the anchor out. The DAX is exempt by construction (a total-return index reinvests dividends, so and the carry model is already exact), as are the US indices (real-time futures plus a smooth, diversified dividend stream keep the discrete-dividend error below measurement noise).

Known Limitations