Financial futures refer to futures contracts with financial instruments as the subject matter. As a kind of futures trading, financial futures has the general characteristics of futures trading, but compared with commodity futures, its contract subject matter is not physical goods, but traditional financial goods, such as securities; Currency, exchange rate, interest rate, etc.
For a long time, the profit model of China stock market is single, and investors can make money only when the stock price rises. The lack of short-selling mechanism also makes domestic stock market manipulation prevalent. Bankers and some large institutions use their capital and information advantages to push up the stock price, which makes the stock price deviate from its normal value range for a long time, which will lead to the accumulation of systemic risks in the stock market and increase the risks faced by stock investors. Stock index futures not only enrich investors' asset portfolio, but also prevent the accumulation of systemic risks. Stock index futures provide an internal balance mechanism, which makes the stock index fluctuate within a more reasonable range.
Since the listing of stock index futures, the consistency between the fluctuation of futures index and the proportion of mature trading positions fully reflects the characteristics of mature markets. The participation rate of investors in opening accounts has increased from the initial 50% to the current 89%, and the volatility of the underlying index has dropped to a record high. During this period, all contracts have been running smoothly and there has never been an expiration date effect. Various phenomena show that the domestic financial futures market is developing steadily.
With the gradual maturity and perfection of the trading rules, information technology system and staff training in the stock index futures market, the regulatory authorities' restrictions on participating in stock index futures are expected to be relaxed in the future. In the future, institutional investors such as Public Offering of Fund, trust wealth management products and Sunshine Private Equity will join the hedging and arbitrage trading of stock index futures. Compared with international mature markets, the proportion of institutional investors participating in domestic stock index futures is still very low.
According to the data of CICC, institutional investors only account for 3% of the investor structure of stock index futures. However, the hedging transactions of CME institutions and legal persons in the United States account for 6 1.3% of the total stock index futures trading volume, of which 7.5% are non-hedging large transactions, 20.6% are small traders and 8.8% are spread transactions. With the deepening of investors' understanding of stock index futures, the scale of futures positions and transactions will continue to expand on a stable basis, and the functions of stock index futures such as hedging risks, stabilizing the market and promoting price discovery will be better reflected.