How Futures and Options Help you build your Portfolio

Investment in derivative instruments such as futures and options is widely considered as a risky affair. While derivative instruments do carry a high risk, they can also be used to reduce risks with proper planning and analysis. Unlike equity investments, futures and options don’t require a very high amount of capital investment. You will require just a fraction of the value of stock market investments. The value of derivatives is derived from the future prospect of the underlying indices or stocks. For e.g.when you invest in futures and options, you are making a future promise to buy or sell a particular number of shares of a company at a predetermined price and date. Many traders choose to invest in f & o, as the return on investment is really high. Here’s how futures and options help you build your portfolio:-

Leverage

Both futures and options have become an attractive investment due to high leverage. Leverage is a measurement of the value of an investment relative to the money required to buy or sell the investment. Hence, an investor only needs to put up a fraction of the value of a particular asset when he wants to buy it. This, in turn, leads to high leverage. Generally, a futures and options can be sold or bought within 2% to 20% margin of the actual value of the contract.

Opportunity

An investor can choose from a wide range of futures and options instruments which includes agricultural commodities such as soybeans and wheat, precious metals such as silver and gold as well as foreign currencies such as Canadian dollar and Deutschemark, energy products like crude oil and natural gas, soft commodities like coffee and sugar and much more. Given the wide number of options in the market, an investor is bound to good trading opportunities at any time.

Diversification

Another important factor that makes futures and options investments appealing is diversification. They can provide a high degree of diversification to an investor’s portfolio than traditional financial assets such as stock and bonds. A diversified portfolio on account of options trading will provide returns which are very similar to the performance of the entire market.

  

Liquidity

Liquidity is the measure of the ease of transactions in the market. Futures and options offer very high liquidity to the investor. There are several futures market that can be even more liquid than cash. Sometimes the prices in the futures market are so liquid that the prices of the futures become the industry benchmark.