Futures Specific Properties | Root Symbol, Month, Ticker, Expiry Date | Quantra Course
Part of the course on Futures Trading: Concepts & Strategies: https://quantra.quantinsti.com/course...
Welcome to this video on futures specific properties. Rather than reading and memorizing the lengthy specifications documents for each futures market all you really need to know is a set of standard properties.
In this section we’ll look closer at these properties and how they work the same way for practically all futures markets. This is when things move from the theoretical to the practical.
These are properties that you need to know about every market you want to trade and by knowing them you can effectively treat all futures markets in the world the same way.
For every futures market you want to trade you need to know these properties. Let’s go over them, one by one.
Root Symbol
Every futures market has a symbol of usually two or three letters designating the market. For example the Comex gold market has root symbol GC and the crude oil market CL. This property is specific to the market not to the individual contract.
Month
When you buy a contract such as Gold, you buy a specific delivery. You don’t just buy gold
you buy December 2021 gold, for instance. To signify the month in question a single letter is used
according to the delivery code standard These month letters are the same for all futures markets
and something you should simply memorize.
Ticker
Every futures contract has a ticker consisting of the root symbol month letter and a number for the year. The year number is usually one or two letters depending on the data provider. Putting it all together a ticker may as an example be GCM2. With such a code using only a single or two year digit the decade is implied and this would refer to Comex Gold June 2022.
Expiry Date
Every futures contract has a final date at which time it ceases to exist. This is the last day in the life of this particular futures contract and for many markets this is the date you need to be out by. But careful here. For commodity futures you need to be out before the first notice date.
That’s all for this video.
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