Where does forward collide?

A forward contract is a private agreement between two parties to buy or sell an asset at a price fixed now for delivery on a future date: unlike an exchange-traded futures contract, it is customised to the pair, settled once at maturity, and carries the other party's credit risk directly. The forward price is the delivery price that makes the contract worth nothing to enter into today, and the forward rate is its analogue for interest rates and currencies. Black's 1976 The pricing of commodity contracts set out how such forward and futures commitments on a commodity are priced from the underlying and the cost of carrying it. The referent is a financial commitment about a future trade, valued in the price of an asset, and it has nothing to do with a rule-firing strategy inside a reasoning program or an attacking role on a sports field.[1]

Unit

One bilateral contract to trade an asset at a fixed price on a set future date

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Valued by the forward price implied by the spot price and the net cost of carrying the asset to maturity

Forward chaining is a data-driven reasoning strategy: an inference engine starts from the facts it already holds, fires every rule whose conditions those facts satisfy, adds the conclusions as new facts, and repeats until it reaches a goal or nothing further can be derived. It runs from evidence toward conclusions, the opposite direction to backward chaining, which starts from a goal and works back to the facts that would establish it. Forgy's 1982 Rete: A fast algorithm for the many pattern/many object pattern match problem gave the matching method that made large forward-chaining production systems practical. The referent is a control strategy inside a rule-based program, counted in rules fired and facts derived, and it is unrelated to a contract about a future trade or a position on a playing field.[2]

Unit

One inference cycle: rules matched against known facts, then fired to add new facts

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced by the rules that fire, the facts they derive, and the match cost of each cycle