Basic definition
Futures and spot are completely different. Spot is actually a tradable commodity. Futures are mainly not commodities, but standardized tradable contracts based on some popular products such as cotton, soybeans and oil and financial assets such as stocks and bonds. Therefore, the subject matter can be commodities (such as gold, crude oil and agricultural products) or financial instruments.
Other information
Because futures trading is an open contract transaction of forward delivery goods, a lot of market supply and demand information is concentrated in this market, and different people come from different places and have different understandings of all kinds of information, which leads to different views on forward prices through open bidding.
In fact, the process of futures trading is a comprehensive reflection of the change of supply and demand relationship and the expectation of price trend in a certain period of time in the future. This kind of price information has the characteristics of continuity, openness and anticipation, which is conducive to increasing market transparency and improving resource allocation efficiency.