system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: how is futures trading any riskier than regular stocks if you’re just putting in the same amount of money to potentially lose?
gpt
I once read a story about a person who was trading on oil futures. He worked for a small refinery, and they could process a small amount of crude oil. But his job was to try to order futures above that amount when prices were favorable and sell those futures to other people before the delivery date. 

That worked great until one period of low oil prices and uncharacteristically low demand lasted much longer than expected and he wasn't able to sell his futures in time. That ended with 3 tankers anchored outside their port carrying 300x more oil than the refinery could possibly unload and created a very large and expensive problem for everyone involved because the ships had other schedules to keep and hurting relations with the shipping companies could long-term affect the refinery's logistics chains.

Stocks aren't physical goods. If at some point the stock stays lower than you expected, you always have the option to wait and see if the price recovers. The worst-case is the company goes out of business and you lost your investment.

But futures have a delivery date, and if you can't sell by then or accept the delivery you're going to not just have lost money on your investment, you're going to have an expensive logistical nightmare trying to figure out where to put 20,000 pigs or 600,000 barrels of crude while angry truck drivers and ship captains are chewing you out.