The so-called futures means that people are willing to pay the price of a commodity at some time in the future. Futures contracts have a delivery period, such as gold 10, which means gold futures 10 due in June. If you buy gold 10 now and haven't sold it by June 10, you have to exchange the contract for physical gold on June 10. If the futures value is profitable, you can get a certain weight of gold.
For oil speculators, of course, you can often see words like American crude oil futures. American crude oil futures are WTI (West Texas Intermediate) futures contracts for the New York Mercantile Exchange (COMEX) light sweet crude oil.
Futures trading is a special way of trading. International crude oil physical transaction mainly adopts the pricing method of benchmark price+/-discount, and futures trading prices such as WTI, Brent and Dubai are often used as benchmark prices. Take CME's WTI futures contract as an example, its specification is 1000 barrels per lot, the quotation unit is USD/barrel, and the minimum price fluctuation unit is 1 cent.
Extended data:
At present, the crude oil produced in the Western Hemisphere is mainly priced by WTI, including ANS (Alaska North Slope Crude Oil) in the United States, MAYA (Maya Crude Oil) in Mexico, orinte (Aurieth Crude Oil) in Ecuador, SANTABARBARA (Santa Barbara Crude Oil) in Venezuela and ESCALANTE (Klandt Crude Oil) in Argentina.
On April 20th, 2020, the price of light crude oil for May delivery in the New York Mercantile Exchange collapsed, dropping by $55.90 to-$37.63/barrel, a decrease of 305.97%.
References:
Baidu encyclopedia-American crude oil