Blog about trading calendar futures spreads on CME and ICE. I started trading back in the beginning of 2013. Before that I spent about a year learning about this king of trading.
Trading futures calendar spreads simply means that you buy or sell an exchange traded calendar spread on a commodity. So when you buy, for example, a March-May crude oil spread - that means that you buy crude oil March contract (which is called a first leg of a spread) and sell May contract (and this is second leg) because you think that March futures price will rise up faster than May futures price or that March futures price will fall slower than May futures price. And everything is opposite when you sell spread. Important thing is to buy exchange traded spreads, because in this case exchange margin are much lower than if you'll buy or sell every leg separately. For example, if you'll buy March future (from previous example) and sell May future you may end up with blocking thousands and thousands of dollars on your account for Initial and Maintenance margins. But if you'll buy a specific exchange traded March-May crude oil spreads only a few hundreds of dollars will be blocked for margin purposes. And of course not all brokers support exchange traded spreads, so you have to find a specific one.
Also this blog is particularly about seasonal calendar spreads which means that I try to trade seasonal patterns. For example, in summer demand for gasoline is usually higher than in autumn - so at the beginning of spring I buy summer months and sell autumn months. Usually positions are held during a few weeks, maximum of a month or two. There is no technical analysis, take profits or stop losses. Simply position is opened when seasonality begins and it's closed when it's over.
Specifications page on this blog tells you all about contracts that will be traded - their symbol name, size, tick value, traded months, hours and exchange. Charts page allows you to build End Of Day or delayed free data charts of futures spreads. On Resources page there is a list of web sites that are used commonly to find and test previous results.
All profits & losses shown here are calculated based on 1 lot contract size.
