There are many kinds of speculative ways for individual investors to choose in the futures market, and their practices are much more complicated than hedging transactions. The main ways of speculation are: using the fluctuation of commodity prices to speculate. This is the most common way of speculation, that is, speculators use the prediction of market prices to buy futures when the market is bullish or sell futures when the market is bearish, and then choose favorable opportunities to offset them in order to obtain interest spread income. The key to using commodity price fluctuations for futures speculation lies in whether the market price trend is predicted accurately. Correct prediction can certainly benefit from it, but if you make mistakes, it will also cause losses. In the actual speculative trading process, it is not easy to truly and accurately judge the future price trend because the price trend of commodities will be affected by many factors. Therefore, the operation of this speculative method is very difficult. Use the price difference between futures of the same commodity in different months to speculate. This kind of speculation is often called "cross-profit between futures", which uses the short-term imbalance between supply and demand of a futures commodity to earn the price difference in different futures months. When the market demand is strong, commodity prices will rise, and the price difference of the same commodity in different periods will also increase accordingly. At this time, speculators can sell forward futures contracts when the market is booming, buy recent futures contracts for write-offs, or buy forward futures contracts when the market is weak, and sell recent futures contracts for write-offs, thus obtaining spread profits.

The success of price difference speculation in this period does not determine the absolute price of goods, but mainly depends on the change of price difference in different periods. Therefore, speculators are required to accurately predict the price difference trend in different periods when adopting this speculation method. However, whether it is profit or loss, the amount of speculation is small, so the risk is small, which is most suitable for small and medium-sized retail investors. Use the difference between the spot price and the futures price of the same commodity for speculation. This is commonly referred to as "basis trading". The relationship between supply and demand in the market is constantly changing. When the market supply and demand balance or supply exceeds demand, the futures price will be higher than the spot price due to the role of spot storage costs. This difference is called "futures premium" (or "spot discount") in futures jargon. However, when the demand for goods in the market is in short supply and the demand for spot goods is in short supply, the spot price will be higher than the futures price. This situation is called "spot premium" (or "futures premium").