Futures Symbol Shortcuts

Owned by Chris Harrison
Last updated: Jul 27, 2022 by Brendan Hebert
1 min read

cmdtyView provides a number of different shortcodes to decrease the amount of symbol maintenance and make adding multiple symbols at a time easier. A few examples can be found below.

Use the following shortcuts when entering a futures symbol so that when the contracts expire, the application will automatically roll the contracts over to the new front month.

 

The * Shortcut

  • ZC*1 (ES*1, etc.) will return the front month for the specified commodity code

  • ZC*2 will return the second month out for the specified commodity code

  • ES*3 will return the third month out for the specified commodity code

  • CL*4 will return the fourth month out for the specified commodity code

  • GC*0 - Many futures contracts (such as Gold) have a "most active contract", a contract where most of the trading is focused, which is not necessarily the front month. For the current active contract, enter the root followed by *0.

 

The # Shortcut

You may also use the # character to add multiple months of futures contracts to a quoteboard.

  • ZC#4 adds the first four front months of CBOT Corn to your quoteboard

  • NG#50 adds the first fifty front months of NYMEX Natural Gas to your quoteboard

 

The : Shortcut

For futures Exchange Traded Spreads, you can quickly enter in spread by entering in the front leg’s full symbol, followed by a colon and then keying in the full symbol of the following leg(s)

  • ZSQ22:ZSX22 will populate the CBOT August-November Soybean exchange traded standard calendar spread

  • CLU22:CLV22:CLX22 will populate the NYMEX September-October-November butterfly spread

  • NGU2:NGV2:NGX2:NGZ2 will populate the September-October-November-December condor spread