The essence of futures is to sign a forward contract for buying and selling commodities (or stock indexes, foreign exchange, interest rates) with others to achieve the purpose of preserving value or making money. If you think the futures price will rise, go long (buy to open a position), close the position if it rises (sell), and make a profit: price difference = closing price - opening price. If you think the futures price will fall, go short (sell to open a position), if it falls (buy) to close the position, you will make a profit: price difference = opening price - closing price. It is generally easy to understand long futures trading, but not so easy to understand short selling. Let’s take short selling of wheat as an example (the seller does not necessarily have the goods in hand when signing the selling contract) to explain the principle of short selling in futures: When the price of wheat is 2,000 yuan per ton, you estimate that the price of wheat will fall. You and the buyer in the futures market Signed a (first-hand) contract, (for example) stipulating that within half a year, you can sell him 10 tons of standard wheat at any time at a price of 2,000 yuan per ton. (The value is 2,000 × 10 = 20,000 yuan, calculated based on a 10% margin. You should provide a performance deposit of 2,000 yuan. The performance deposit will change with the change of the contract value.) This is short selling (opening a short position). In actual operation, you are selling a wheat futures contract to open a position. Why does the buyer sign a contract with you? Because he is bullish. When you sign a contract, you do not necessarily have wheat in your hands (usually you do not really want to sell wheat). You are observing the market. If the market goes down as you wish, , when it fell to 1,800 yuan per ton, you bought 10 tons of wheat at 1,800 yuan per ton and sold it to the buyer at 2,000 yuan per ton. The contract was fulfilled (your performance deposit was returned to you). You earned: ( 2000-1800) × 10 = 2000 (yuan) (the handling fee is generally 10 yuan round trip, ignore it) This is profit closing. In actual operation, you are buying and closing one wheat futures contract. The buyer (not specific) who signed the contract with you lost 2,000 yuan (the handling fee is ignored). For the entire operation, you only need to sell one hand of wheat at 2000 points and buy the flat position at 1800 points, which is very convenient. After opening a futures position, you can close the position at any time before the delivery period, and you can also buy and sell multiple times on the same day. If the price of wheat rises within half a year, and you have no chance to buy low-priced wheat to close your position, you will be forced to buy high-priced wheat to close your position (the contract must be closed when it expires), and you will lose money, and the person who signed the contract with you will The buyer makes a profit. If you close your position at 2200 points, you will lose: (2200-2000) × 10 = 2000 (yuan) + 10 yuan handling fee. The buyer (non-specific) who signed the contract with you made 2,000 yuan (the handling fee is ignored ).