1 Different trading places: spot foreign exchange is generally traded through banks or market makers, so there is often a bid-ask spread in the middle, which is the cost charged by banks and market makers; Foreign exchange futures are traded through exchanges, such as the CME exchange in the United States, which trades a large number of drunken foreign exchange futures contracts in the world. It is a matching transaction, and the transaction method is similar to that of stocks, so there is no bid-ask spread.

2 Contract restrictions are different: foreign exchange spot, generally speaking, the contract value is US$ 1, as a standard lot, and formal transactions are also conducted by hand. The contract has no certain delivery period and can be held for a long time, but inter-bank interest has to be paid; For foreign exchange futures, the benchmark of the trading contract is the standard contract under the IMM settlement system. Generally speaking, the monthly contracts on March, June, September and December are the main contracts of the year, but there are also monthly contracts basically. The normal trading period is the third Tuesday of the contract month as the drunken delivery date. If the position has not been closed before, the delivery procedures must be handled for delivery. Foreign exchange futures positions do not require any interest.

3 The main investors are different: undeniably, the trading volume of foreign exchange spot is also huge, but it is mostly between banks, market makers and speculators; Foreign exchange futures, on the other hand, are mainly engaged in hedging in forex futures trading, which mostly happens between foreign trade industries and companies, while individual speculators only account for about 5% of the forex futures trading market. From this point of view, the nature of investment in forward exchange market is much heavier than that in the spot foreign exchange market.

4 The security and reliability of trading are different: it is undeniable that foreign exchange futures belong to the futures industry in all countries and are strictly supervised by the regulatory authorities in all countries, so the trading security is high; However, the laws and regulations on foreign exchange spot trading are not perfect, and no country has a perfect supervision mechanism to supervise it at present. Generally, the supervision regulations on foreign exchange futures are adopted after the incident. In terms of reliability, foreign exchange futures have special exchanges to organize transactions, so they are more reliable; The spot of foreign exchange is a tacit understanding and spontaneous behavior between banks in various countries. Once there are political factors or other factors, the quotation will inevitably be affected, which is also a cause for concern.