In 1970s, the futures market made a breakthrough, and a large number of financial futures appeared and gradually occupied the leading position in the futures market. The prosperity of financial futures mainly benefits from the violent turmoil in the international financial market, and financial risks have attracted more and more attention. The introduction of financial futures meets people's need to avoid financial market risks. With the success of many financial futures contracts, the futures market is full of vitality and has achieved rapid development.

There are many kinds of futures contracts related to finance. There are five varieties that have been developed: futures contracts with stock indexes as the subject matter. Stock index futures are the hottest and fastest-growing futures trading in the financial futures market. Stock index futures do not involve the delivery of the stock itself, its price is calculated according to the stock index, and the contract is delivered in the form of cash settlement.

There are several representative stock indexes that have extensive influence in the world.

1, Dow Jones price index

2. Standard & Poor's 500 Index

3. Financial Times Index

4. Hong Kong Hang Seng Index financial futures are traded centrally on futures exchanges or stock exchanges. A futures exchange is a place that specializes in buying and selling futures contracts. It is the core of futures and bears the important function of organizing and supervising futures trading.

Standardized futures contracts and hedging mechanisms;

Futures contracts are standardized contracts designed by the exchange and announced to the market after approval by the competent authorities. Futures contracts are designed as standardized contracts in order to facilitate both parties to hedge their reverse transactions before the contract expires, thus avoiding physical delivery. In order to control the risks of futures trading and improve the efficiency, the member brokerage companies of futures exchanges must pay the settlement deposit to the exchanges or clearing houses, and both parties to futures trading must pay a certain amount of deposit to the exchanges or clearing houses through brokers. Because the margin ratio of futures trading is very low, the leverage is very high.

Clearing house and debt-free settlement system:

Clearing house is a specialized clearing institution for futures trading. The clearing house implements a debt-free daily settlement system, also known as the "mark-to-market system", that is, the average transaction price of each futures contract within the specified time before the closing of the trading day is the settlement price of the day. Compare with the price at each transaction. Calculate the floating profit and loss of the member accounts of each clearing house and carry out liquidation with the market. Because the daily timing system takes one trading day as the longest settlement cycle, the trading positions of all accounts are calculated according to different maturity dates, and all trading gains and losses are required to be settled in time, so as to adjust the margin accounts in time and control market risks. After the establishment of the position limit system, the large account declaration system is a risk control system in which members or customers must declare the account opening, trading, capital source and trading motivation to the exchange when their positions reach the number specified by the exchange. , so that the exchange can examine whether there is excessive speculation and market manipulation in large accounts and judge the trading risk status of large accounts.

Daily price fluctuation limit and circuit breaker rules:

In order to prevent excessive irrational changes in futures prices, exchanges usually stipulate the maximum fluctuation range allowed in each trading period. Once the price limit is reached, orders above and below the changing price are invalid.