The so-called gold futures refer to futures contracts with the gold price of the international gold market as the trading target at a certain time in the future. The profit and loss of investors buying and selling gold futures is measured by the difference between entry and exit, which is the physical delivery after the contract expires.

Spot gold refers to physical delivery, such as gold bars and coins. Spot gold is only a virtual book transaction, without physical delivery. How many grams of gold are there in your passbook? It's just a bookkeeping symbol, and you can't extract physical gold. It just earns the difference by buying and selling. The former can preserve and increase value, but it takes time. I'm afraid it's not safe to keep gold bars at home. I can rent a safe in the bank. Because the latter does not involve physical objects, there is no potential safety hazard, but it is also necessary to grasp the market when trading.

Difference 2: trading time

Trading time: Spot gold consists of Asian plate, European plate and American plate, and its trading time is 24 hours. Investors can trade at any time of the day. However, gold futures are limited by trading time. In China, the trading time of Shanghai Gold on the Shanghai Stock Exchange just missed the beginning of the European and American markets where the price of gold fluctuated the most.

Difference 3: trading rules

Trading rules, spot gold is traded by market traders, that is to say, you can successfully facilitate the transaction at any time if you want to buy or sell it, but gold futures are matchmaking transactions, and there may be undeliverable situations when the big market comes, which to a certain extent increases the risk of investors indefinitely.

Difference 4: leverage ratio

The leverage ratio of spot gold is 1 to 100. You can buy and sell gold as soon as you pay a deposit of 1000 dollars, but gold futures need much more funds, and the demand for funds is large, and the corresponding risks are also great.

To sum up, we can find that spot gold is superior to gold futures in terms of game rules. Moreover, spot gold is an international transaction with a history of hundreds of years abroad. In China, gold futures were listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2002, and all aspects of supervision are not very strict, and the market is not very mature, which also magnifies the risks to some extent.