The two parties agree to buy and sell a certain amount and quality of assets at a certain price at a certain time in the future. Futures contracts are standardized contracts formulated by futures exchanges, which stipulate the expiration date of contracts and the types, quantity and quality of assets to be bought and sold.

2. Swap contracts

It is a kind of contract signed by both sides of internal transaction to exchange certain assets with each other in a certain period in the future. He said, more accurately, a swap contract is a contract signed by both parties to exchange cash flows that they think have equal economic value in a certain period in the future.

3. Buying and selling options

This is a transaction of buying and selling rights. Option contracts stipulate the right to buy and sell a certain kind, quantity and quality of primary assets at a certain time and at a certain price. Option contracts include standardized contracts listed on exchanges and non-standardized contracts traded over the counter.

Extended data:

Financial derivatives have the following characteristics:

1, zero-sum game

That is, the gains and losses of both parties to a contract transaction (which are uncertain because they can trade in standardized contracts) are completely negatively correlated, and the net gains and losses are zero, so it is called "zero sum".

2. Intertemporal

Financial derivatives refer to contracts in which both parties agree to trade or choose whether to trade at some future time by predicting the changing trend of interest rates, exchange rates, stock prices and other factors.

Step 3 contact

Here, the value of financial derivatives is closely related to basic products or basic variables, and the rules change. Usually, the payment characteristics of financial derivatives associated with basic variables are stipulated in derivatives contracts, and their linkage relationship can be simple linear relationship, nonlinear function or piecewise function.

Baidu encyclopedia-financial derivatives