Crude oil futures are the most important oil futures, and oil futures are futures with forward oil prices as the subject matter, which is a trading variety in futures trading. However, among oil futures contracts, crude oil futures is the most traded variety. Compared with the spot market of crude oil, crude oil futures have the following characteristics: 1. Low bid-ask spread: Due to active trading, the bid-ask spread of crude oil futures can be as low as 1. 2. Small-batch trading: Futures trading provides the possibility for small-batch trading (multiple of 65438+0,000 barrels), while the quantity standard in the spot market is higher. 3. Flexible trading time: The trading time of crude oil futures is nearly 24 hours, making it more convenient and flexible for investors to invest and trade. 4. Flexibility: By providing futures contracts corresponding to the spot market, the oil industry can use futures cash and basis trading to lock prices and arrange production, thus better controlling the time of buying and selling commodities. 5. High efficiency and transparency: Strong trading system and settlement system enable customers to keep abreast of market changes. Real-time prices can be obtained through major data providers. Therefore, all participants can know the price situation in real time when trading. 6. Highly leveraged trading: Because futures contracts are traded in the form of margin, and the margin only accounts for a small part of the total contract value, this low margin and high leverage feature makes trading and hedging more cost-effective. Crude oil futures also have three functions: 1 and price discovery. There are many commodity producers, operators and speculators in the futures market. They trade and influence each other on the basis of production cost plus expected profit. Traders analyze and predict the future price of commodities, and form the expected benchmark price of oil through organized public bidding. This relatively authoritative benchmark price will also change due to the change of market supply and demand, which has certain dynamic characteristics. 2. Avoid risks. Hedging is one of the basic operating modes of the oil futures market. Enterprises can achieve risk procurement through hedging, which can keep production and operation costs or expected profits relatively stable, thus enhancing their ability to resist market price risks. Because the difference between spot price and futures price exists objectively, hedging can not completely eliminate the risk, but replaces the greater risk with smaller risk, and replaces the risk of spot price change with the risk of spot price difference and futures price difference. 3. regulate speculation. Capital has a natural speculative demand. Using the oil futures market can attract a lot of funds, thus providing the first driving force for the development of the oil industry. Using the futures market, traders can avoid the negative impact of international oil price fluctuations on the one hand; On the other hand, we can get more benefits from market price fluctuations through speculative trading.