The so-called CTA refers to commodity trading consultant, which is a fund management method in the futures industry. Unless there is a special pardon, all commodity trading consultants must be registered with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and must be members of the National Futures Association. Therefore, commodity trading consultant (CTA) is under the dual supervision of CFTC and NFA. According to the requirements of the Act, CTA must provide sufficient information to customers. The term originally refers to the American agricultural futures trading consultant. However, with the increase of interest rate futures and equity futures, CTA's business is no longer limited to agricultural futures trading, so CTA is sometimes called custody futures. In the futures market, CTA is one of the futures market structures that have been greatly developed after the large-scale development of financial futures in the 1970s. It transforms the original binary structure of futures market, which consists of hedgers and investors, into a ternary structure.

The main business functions of CTA include:

1) directly accepts the entrustment of individual customers and makes trading decisions on behalf of customers in the interests of customers.

2) Provide customers with services such as analysis reports, suggestions or software platforms, and collect performance commissions and management fees through these services. CTA is very similar to the mutual fund in the stock market in the futures market. However, CTA cannot publicly issue fund shares, so it must strictly disclose risks to investors, and regularly report the performance of management accounts to the regulatory authorities for inspection and publication.

From the experience of American market, CTA has three advantages compared with individual investors in the futures market:

1.CTA has a clear long-term consistent investment strategy, as well as a fund management and risk control system.

2.CTA will continue to monitor the market and analyze the risks and opportunities brought about by market price changes, so as to invest or reduce risk positions at a relatively suitable time.

3.CTA has strict trading discipline, which can avoid the influence of investors' psychological fluctuation on the trading strategy effect. Therefore, since 1980, the CTA management funds of Barclays Group have increased by more than 20 times.

The development of CTA not only provides a way for individual investors to reduce the risk of futures investment, but also becomes a tool for institutional investors such as banks, hedge funds, mutual funds and pension insurance to spread risks and expand the effective boundary of their portfolios. Accordingly, for American financial futures market, with the diversification of market structure, some individual investors entrust futures investment to professional institutions such as CTA, which greatly reduces the transaction risk brought by immature market.

In the domestic financial futures market, it is difficult for individual investors to improve their professional level of futures investment in a short time. Relatively speaking, it may be easier to introduce CTA institutions to provide futures trading advice to individual investors or directly manage individual investors' futures investment accounts. In addition, the introduction of CTA institutions can further enrich domestic futures market institutions and solve the problem of lack of institutional investors.

CTA is equivalent to the fund manager of a general fund. The difference is that CTA deals with futures contracts and options, while ordinary fund managers deal with traditional investment tools such as stocks and bonds.

Different from traditional mutual funds and hedge funds, CTA funds are not traditional collective financial products. The popular CTA model in Europe and America is that each CTA fund has only one fund manager, and the fund manager manages multiple commodity trading consultants at the same time, and each consultant can manage one or more futures accounts, forming an umbrella fund management structure.