A Study On Financial Derivative Worldwide Transactions -Futures Contracts

Financial products and financial derivatives transactions are on front page in the profile publications, because they have generated huge gains for a small part of market participants, and losses as well, sometimes followed by collapse even on the international financial institutions. Very common we can find in specialized media the hypothesis that the global instability was caused by derivative contracts and by the magnitude of these transactions, from the years preceding the crisis. Since they appeared in order to protect investors against various risks, we believe that the approach must have via derivative products is the ethical one. It is true that derivatives trades have grown very rapidly and have expanded from the commercial field (commodity derivatives) to the capital market, but this was because the demand for such products was very high. Basically, the demand for financial derivatives products has validated their existence in the market. Derivative financial products are used by traders of financial intermediation companies, dealers, brokers, individual investors and corporations or governments. Precisely because of this large spectrum of users of financial derivatives, we can ask whether they should be used only by specialists in derivatives trading. Taken literally, the term derivative refers to a new product resulting from the modification of an existing product, but has different properties from the original product and from which it was derived (Business Dictionary 2012). But financially speaking, a derivative is a financial contract between two or more parts that comes from the future value of n reference asset (Reuters 2001, 17). Of course, in literature there are many definitions of the concept of financial derivative. If we were to build our own simple definition, we define financial derivatives as financial contracts based on an underlying asset whose price on the spot market determines its price. This is a very simple statement, but true. Regarding the main categories of derivatives market, the literature (Popa 1994, 62) (Bako 2006, 65) refers to four such categories: forward markets, futures markets, options market and swap markets. We chose as a subject for this article the futures market, worldwide. The latest data available at this time refer to 2010 statistics; in this area the data for 2011 are not available yet.