Futures Symbol Shortcuts
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)
ZSQ24:ZSX24 will populate the CBOT August-November Soybean exchange traded standard calendar spread
CLU24:CLV24:CLX24 will populate the NYMEX September-October-November butterfly spread
NGU4:NGV4:NGX4:NGZ4 will populate the September-October-November-December condor spread