It stands for single stock futures; a futures contract in which the underlying asset is one specific stock of a public company or a narrow-based index. It is equivalent to the simultaneous combination of a short put and a long call on a given stock.

Similar to other financial futures, single stock futures have standardized features especially in terms of the transaction size, which is typically fixed at 100 shares of equity. Once the single stock is purchased, share rights or dividends don’t need to be transferred. Futures contracts are naturally traded on margin, and hence they encounter no such limitations on the underlying as those the short selling is subject to. Single stock futures allow investors to sell a standardized amount of a given stock short without having to observe a downtick in that stock, as would be required in other types of transactions.

The single stock futures is also referred to as an individual equity futures.