In the process of futures trading, investors can often trade futures by opening empty orders or multiple orders. The so-called empty order means that the investor sells a certain contract first, and when the price of the futures contract is lower than the selling price of the investor's empty order, the investor sells the empty order that has been built before closing the position, and then buys it to obtain the difference income. Short-selling profit actually refers to a trading method in which investors make profits by opening short orders.
Opening empty orders is also a means for many manufacturers to lock prices and avoid risks through the futures market. The futures market is a zero-sum market, even a negative-sum market. After all, the purpose of opening the futures market is not to let investors get the price difference between commodity buying and selling, but to let industrial capitalists get a place to avoid the risk of price fluctuation. For example, the original intention of setting up rebar futures on domestic commodity exchanges is to solve the problem of large price cycle fluctuation of steel enterprises. Due to the large fluctuation of steel prices, when the prices of rebar and other products are low, steel production enterprises are often prone to large profit losses. Therefore, the establishment of rebar futures enables a large number of domestic steel enterprises to open empty orders to lock prices. In this way, before the unfavorable trend of steel price appears, steel enterprises can sell in the futures market in advance by opening empty orders, lock in the sales price of steel, and prevent the profit damage caused by the decline of steel prices to steel production enterprises.
In this case, opening an empty order is not only a means for futures investors to play the price game, but also a way for production enterprises to spend the "unfavorable economic cycle". After all, no one can accurately predict the trend of market prices. When commodity prices rise, although the empty orders issued by production enterprises will cause losses, the losses caused by futures will also reduce part of the overall profits because the commodities they produce are in a profitable state. When commodity prices fall, empty orders of production enterprises can make up for the losses caused by low commodity prices. This is the rationality of the existence of futures market.