Volume and Open Interest Volume and open interest are measures to determine the liquidity of a futures market - the more liquid a market, the faster and easier that trades can be executed.
Volume is a running count of the number of futures contracts traded during the day.
It is the number of futures contracts that have changed hands. Open interest is the number of futures contracts outstanding, that is, that have not been closed or offset. Official volume and open interest figures are calculated and disseminated by futures exchanges at the end of the trading day, and usually printed in newspapers along with futures prices. This page is created by Julia Lee '99 and is maintained by Professor Satyananda Gabriel of the Economics Department, Mount Holyoke College , January 1999.