Hedging arbitrage generally refers to the trading behavior that futures market participants use the price difference between different months, different markets and different commodities to buy and sell two different types of futures contracts at the same time to obtain risk profits from them. It is a special way of futures speculation, which enriches and develops the content of futures speculation, making futures speculation not only limited to the horizontal change of the absolute price of futures contracts, but also turned to the horizontal change of the relative price of futures contracts.

I. Stock index futures and margin trading

Stock index futures and margin trading are the premise of hedging, so we need to understand these two basic concepts before we understand hedging.

Stock index futures

At present, stock index futures mainly track the Shanghai and Shenzhen 300 index, which is somewhat similar to the familiar ETF index fund. For example, 50ETF mainly tracks the SSE 50 index, but it has two different characteristics.

① Investors who buy ETF index funds with a value of 6.5438+0 million must have funds of 6.5438+0 million yuan, while investors who buy stock index futures with a value of 6.5438+0 million only need to pay a deposit of 6.5438+0.8%, that is, 6.5438+0.8 million yuan.

2 2 ②ETF index funds can only be bought unilaterally, and only when they rise can they make money, while stock index futures can be bought up or down, and can be traded in both directions.