Leverage. Generally speaking, financial derivatives trading can sign long-term large contracts or exchange different financial instruments as long as a small amount of margin or royalty is paid. While the income may increase exponentially, the risks and losses borne by investors will also increase exponentially. A little change in the price of basic tools may bring big profits and big losses to investors.
Linkage. The value of financial derivatives is closely connected with the basic assets or variables, and the rules change. Usually, the continuous payment characteristics of financial derivatives and basic variables are stipulated by derivatives contracts, and their linkage relationship can be simple linear or nonlinear.
Uncertainty or high risk. The trading consequences of financial derivatives depend on the extent to which traders predict and judge the future prices of basic instruments. The unpredictability of fund instrument prices determines the instability of financial derivatives trading gains and losses, which is an important reason for the high risk of financial derivatives. There are also credit risk, market risk, liquidity risk and settlement risk.