Not that I want to rush the season, but it's time to think about the financial implications of snow.

A blizzard is more than an inconvenience or a day off for the kids. The piles of white stuff might as well be stacks of money made or lost for some, especially if you plow it, travel through it or make salt for it.

Enter the opportunistic folks at CME Group (CME), owner of the Chicago and New York mercantile exchanges and the Chicago Board of Trade. They have come up with futures and options contracts based on predicted snowfalls.

Starting Dec. 7, the exchange will offer the contracts for snow as recorded at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Other contracts will cover New York/LaGuardia Airport, Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport and Detroit Metro Airport.

Barry Goldblatt, managing director of commodity, energy and metals products at CME, said the contracts were devised after discussions with people in the snow removal and landscaping businesses, as well as salt suppliers. "Essentially, they are looking for a way to cover their losses if it snows less or more than they anticipate," he said.

The simplest form of this contract is the options version. Called a binary option, it works a little like a raffle ticket. You have a chance for a known payoff, but your risk is limited to what you spend.

Goldblatt used the example of a snow removal firm that expects 20 inches accumulation in a season. It invests in people and equipment accordingly. If it buys the 20-inch option and bets right, it collects the $10,000 payout that is fixed for binary options. If it's wrong, it has spent only its premium, which would be small if the market believes the snow total is unlikely.

The futures contract works differently. It would be priced at $200 times the O'Hare snow figure, so the contract would be worth $4,000 in our 20-inch example. If sentiment later changed the snowfall expectation to 17 inches, the value of the contract would fall to $3,400. Margin rules for futures trading apply.

CME has been a pioneer in weather-related trading. It has contracts based on temperature levels and hurricane threats and in 2006 started its first snowfall contract for New York Central Park and Boston Logan International. The snow contracts weren't successful at the start, but CME believes the new locations will have more appeal.

Maybe municipalities, especially those facing deficits and heavy costs each time they plow, should start playing the futures markets.

Just kidding, Mr. Mayor.

CAP AND PAY: The "cap-and-trade" proposal in Congress, which involves mandating a market for carbon emissions trading, has been perhaps the most partisan issue out there. (Unless you count, oh, President Obama himself.) Liberals believe it's a responsible, market-driven way to cut pollution and conservatives see the long arm of government creating another tax.

Ben Johnson, a senior stock analyst at Morningstar, published a reasoned critique of cap-and-trade as its applies to a key group, farmers. They could be hurt by higher energy costs or helped by the revenue they would make by generating carbon offsets, such as by planting trees on tillable land. Johnson looked at both sides and wrote that it's liable to drive consumer prices up and raise costs for farmers.

"Higher energy costs resulting from a cap-and-trade regime would place upward pressure on the prices of key farm inputs like diesel and fertilizer. We think this scenario would be most detrimental to U.S. nitrogen fertilizer producers, whose cash production costs are joined at the hip with natural gas prices." Companies that could be hurt by higher energy costs include Terra (TRA) and CF Industries (CF), Johnson said, while beneficiaries could be Monsanto (MON) and DuPont (DD), seed producers with products that make efficient use of nitrogen fertilizer.

QUALITY LAGGARDS: Are there any true "value" stocks out there? BusinessWeek asked portfolio managers for suggestions of good stocks that missed this year's rally and got the following picks: Core-Mark Holding (CORE), the second largest distributor to U.S. convenience stores, which resist recession because much of what they sell is addictive; Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings (LH), the No. 2 player in clinical testing; J.M. Smucker (SJM), maker of jellies and Jif peanut butter, whose shares declined earlier this year on worries about salmonella, an outbreak to which it was unconnected; and Starbucks (SBUX), which one analyst believes should be back to registering same-store sales growth next year. But beware: Starbucks' stock has burned more people than McDonald's coffee.

CLOSING QUOTE: "All of the components of real estate value are going in the wrong direction simultaneously. Occupancy rates are going down. Rent rates are going down and the capitalization rate -- the return that investors are demanding to buy a property -- are going up." -- investor Wilbur Ross, discussing the "coming crash in commercial real estate," as quoted by Bloomberg News