对金融衍生产品的基本认识和所有其他金融市场的发展一样,金融衍生产品市场的成功发展最终取决于市场参与者如何认识和使用衍生产品。金融衍生产品市场参与者的交易行为通常可以用以下五个术语来表述:投资、投机、赌博、套利和对冲。这五种交易行为在投资理论和理念上具有明显的区别,但在实践中由于信息不对称和委托代理关系等原因又极其容易相互混淆和转化,因而引发困惑和争论。 Basic Understanding of Financial Derivatives As with the development of all other financial markets, the successful development of financial derivatives markets ultimately depends on how market participants recognize and use derivatives. The trading behavior of financial derivatives market participants can usually be expressed in the following five terms: investment, speculation, gambling, arbitrage and hedging. These five kinds of trading behavior have obvious differences in investment theory and philosophy, but in practice, they are extremely confused and transformed with each other because of information asymmetry and principal-agent relationship, which leads to confusion and controversy.