General Guidelines for Creating Charts


Although each charting package on the web is different, all require similar information to get started.  This information includes the commodity, expiration month, and year of expiration of the contract you wish to chart.  Below is a discussion of each of these and an example.  For information required by a specific charting package on the web, please see the help section for that site. 

 

Commodity Code (Ticker Symbol)

The commodity code (ticker symbol) is a one to two letter symbol that represents the commodity you wish to chart.  For example, the commodity code wheat traded at the Chicago Board of Trade is W while wheat traded at the Kansas City Board of Trade is KW.

 

Expiration Month 

The expiration month represents the month in which the contract expires.  Exchanges have adopted a uniform manner in which they represent each month of the year and is presented below.

[ F, G, H, J, K, M, N, Q, U, V, X, Z ] from [ Jan - Dec ].

 

Year of Expiration

The year of expiration can be represented in several different ways, depending on the website.  Generally, the year of expiration is represented as a two digit number representing the year.  For example, 1997 would be represented as 97 and 2000 as 00.  However some websites only require one number.  In this case, 1997 would be 7 and 2000 would be 0.

 

Example

Using the information above, a wheat contract traded at the Kansas City Board of Trade that is due to expire in July, 2000 would be represented as:

KWN00


 

 

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