(1) lever. Leverage is one of the most remarkable characteristics of financial derivative transactions, that is, traders can control more investment with less capital cost, thus improving the return on investment and achieving the goal of "making small and making big". When financial derivatives are traded, they usually only need to pay a certain percentage of margin or margin to obtain the management right and management right of related assets, and the leverage characteristic is very prominent.

(2) risk. Financial derivatives are a kind of financial innovation to preserve the value of investors' assets and guard against risks under the fluctuation environment of international financial market, but their inherent high leverage and high complexity and difficulty in understanding the tool combination determine the high risk of financial derivatives.

(3) linkage. It means that the value of financial derivatives is closely related to the basic products or variables, and the rules have changed. Usually, the payment characteristics of financial derivatives associated with basic variables are stipulated in derivatives contracts, and their linkage relationship can be simple linear relationship, nonlinear function or piecewise function.

(4) intertemporal. Financial derivatives refer to contracts in which both parties agree to trade or choose whether to trade at some future time by predicting the changing trend of interest rates, exchange rates, stock prices and other factors. No matter what kind of financial derivatives, it will affect the cash flow of traders in the future or at some point in the future, and the characteristics of intertemporal transactions are very prominent.