The spot dealer has the goods in hand. As far as hedging is concerned, spot traders and manufacturers mainly sell hedging, while traders buy hedging and sell hedging.
Compared with speculators, spot traders are of course natural bears. The original intention of hedging is to preserve the value of the goods in hand. Hedging is naturally a tool to worry about falling prices. Of course, like some downstream enterprises, they do more buying and hedging. Enterprises participating in the futures market are nothing more than trying to lock in price risks, find lower-priced goods and sell better-priced goods.
Futures, whose English name is futures, is completely different from spot. Spot is actually a tradable commodity. Futures are mainly not commodities, but standardized tradable contracts based on some popular products such as cotton, soybeans and oil and financial assets such as stocks and bonds. Therefore, the subject matter can be commodities (such as gold, crude oil and agricultural products) or financial instruments.
The delivery date of futures can be one week later, one month later, three months later or even one year later.
A contract or agreement to buy or sell futures is called a futures contract. The place where futures are bought and sold is called the futures market. Investors can invest or speculate in futures.
The earliest futures market in history was Japan in the edo shogunate era. Because the price of rice at that time had a great influence on economic and military activities, rice merchants decided to buy and sell rice in stock according to the output of rice and the market's expectation of rice.
In the1970s, Chicago Mercantile Exchange and CBOT innovated many futures products, and vigorously developed many financial futures products, making financial futures the mainstream of the futures market. In the1980s, the Chicago Stock Exchange began to develop electronic trading platforms. At the end of 1990, there was a trend of merger and acquisition among exchanges in various countries.
In ancient China, there was a commodity credit and forward contract system composed of grain depot and grain market. During the Republic of China, there were many futures exchanges in China and Shanghai, and the market was once crazy. The puppet Manchukuo government also set up futures exchanges in Dalian, Yingkou, Fengtian and other northeast 15 cities, mainly engaged in soybean, bean cake and soybean oil futures trade.
1949 after the founding of People's Republic of China (PRC), the futures exchange disappeared in Chinese mainland for decades. By 1992, Zhengzhou had set off another wave of speculation in futures, and various provinces and cities blossomed everywhere. At most, more than 50 futures exchanges opened at the same time, exceeding the sum of futures exchanges in other countries in the world.
On 1994 and 1998, China the State Council strengthened supervision twice, suspended some futures products and ordered some exchanges to stop business. Since 1998, there are only three legal commodity futures exchanges in Chinese mainland: Shanghai Futures Exchange, Dalian Futures Exchange and Zhengzhou Futures Exchange. The former deals in energy and metal commodity futures, while the latter two deal in agricultural products futures.
On September 8, 2006, China Financial Futures Exchange was established in Shanghai, and the first product launched was the Shanghai and Shenzhen 300 stock index futures.