How to play futures: when investors think that futures prices will rise, they can wait for futures prices to rise before selling them to earn the difference; On the contrary, investors will short when they think the price will fall, and then buy when the stock price really falls; Futures is a two-way transaction, and investors can go long or short; Futures are leveraged transactions, and you can trade by paying a deposit; T+0 trading, buy and sell.

Use a very simple example to let friends who are new to futures know what futures are in five minutes.

We take crude oil futures, the most typical commodity in the futures market, as an example. Many countries in the world produce oil, including the Middle East, Russia, the United States and Africa, but consumers can't travel all over the world, and the prices in each place are not uniform. Therefore, in order to facilitate management, these countries set up an organization called the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. They agreed to trade all the crude oil on the earth in a limited number of places (exchanges). The relatively large exchanges are in the United States and Britain, so that everyone only needs to concentrate on buying and selling crude oil on the exchanges, so that they don't have to travel around the world, which is convenient for consumers to buy crude oil and is convenient for unified pricing and management.

This transaction is also very simple. If a businessman offers, say, 50 dollars a barrel of crude oil, you can buy a barrel of crude oil for 50 dollars. This is a spot transaction. In fact, spot trading is no different from buying and selling things in our lives. Of course, if you buy a barrel of oil, you may not be able to move it back that day. You can discuss with the merchant whether I can store it in your warehouse first and I will drive back tomorrow. The merchant said yes, but I can't keep it for free. You have to pay me a storage fee. You have to give me 1 dollar for a barrel of oil a night. This is the overnight fee mentioned in the spot transaction. Then the next day, you went to the market to take your oil away, but you found that today's oil price has risen to 60 dollars a barrel, so you sold your oil for 60 dollars in the market, so you earned 9 dollars in this spot transaction except the overnight fee you paid.

But sometimes people who buy more oil sell less oil, and may not have enough oil in stock, so many people make a trip for nothing. Later, the merchant thought of a way, saying that you should sign a contract with me first. Today, the price is 50 dollars a barrel. When our crude oil arrives next month, whatever the price, you bring the contract and I'll give you a barrel of oil. Some people think that oil is so scarce that they are afraid of raising prices next month, so they signed a contract with the merchants. Oil will come next month, and you will get a barrel of oil at a price of $50 regardless of the oil price. If the market price next month is $60, you will get $65,438+00 by selling it. If a lot of crude oil comes next month and the price drops to 40 dollars, then you will lose 10 dollars, which is futures trading. However, whether you lose money or make money, you don't need to pay the overnight fee for futures, because you only have a paper contract in your hand, which saves a lot of costs invisibly, which is one of the reasons why people prefer to speculate in futures.