Education

Futures markets are based on individual contract. Every contract has its own life cycle. At every moment, there are certain number of contracts, which are active and have expiration dates somewhere in the future. When one contract expires, new contract is added for trading and this cycle repeats. So every contract has its own limited history of data. If we want to have a long-term continuous history, we need to join data of different contracts together. This is different for example to stocks which offer a continuous stream of prices (usually since start of trading).

The Commitments of Traders (COT) reports can sometimes give us a good idea of future significant moves in the market. Every Friday the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) releases the COT Report which aggregates all the futures positions of every major player in the futures markets.

In the petroleum industry, refineries are most concerned about hedging the difference between their input costs and output prices. Their profits are tied directly to the spread between the price of crude oil and the prices of refined products, gasoline and distillates (diesel and jet fuel). This spread is called Crack spread.

The most popular inter commodity spreads involve the simultaneous execution of multiple futures positions designed to replicate the inputs and outputs of several real world product transformations or to hedge that production process by putting on the opposite spread. Examples of these are Crush and Crack spreads.

After you get familiar with the basics of spread trading, you can start to explore more complex strategies that involve more than two legs. In the first part of this article we will focus on multi leg intra commodity spreads like Butterflies and later we will cover multi leg inter commodity spreads like Crack spread and Crush spreads.

At the beginning I would recommend you to go through the entire platform and explore the various modules and their pages (sections). Each section has detailed help (green button in the upper right corner). Start with the main page Analyze - Builder. You will get quick overview of the platform and learn how to build spreads for further analysis. You can also check out our introduction videos.

Basically, we have two ways to evaluate seasonality, numerically and visually. Both methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. In this article, I would like to explain how to correctly evaluate seasonality with the help of seasonal patterns and how to avoid common mistakes.

Spread trade is the simultaneous purchase of one security and sale of a related security, called legs, as one unit. Opening spread trade, we are in long and short position. Why is that useful? There are several applications depending on intentions and traded security. Let’s see some of them.