Trading Crude Oil Futures

Crude oil is one of the most actively traded futures contracts in the world, and retail traders are still working from material that predates the Micro WTI contract, predates negative settlement prices, and predates an entire generation of traders who learned crude the hard way in 2020. This book was written for the trader working today, on the instrument as it actually behaves today.CL has no duration, no conversion factor, no curve, its risk arithmetic is genuinely simpler than a rates instrument's, and this book shows you why, building a Risk Snapshot around Tick Value and Dollar-per-Point instead. What isn't simple is everything else: a report calendar split between the API's Tuesday-afternoon private survey and the EIA's Wednesday-morning official number, a monthly roll cycle that never stops being relevant, and a term-structure vocabulary, contango and backwardation, that tells you more about the physical oil market than any chart pattern will. You'll also learn exactly why CL settles into physical delivery at Cushing, Oklahoma while its smaller sibling, MCL, settles financially and never carries that risk at all, and you'll build the WTI/Brent spread as a genuine relative-value trade grounded in real contract specs.Full trade case studies carry every mechanic from report day through the physical roll into complete, worked executions, the way a desk actually trades this contract, not the way a textbook describes it.

Crude oil is one of the most actively traded futures contracts in the world, and retail traders are still working from material that predates the Micro WTI contract, predates negative settlement prices, and predates an entire generation of traders who learned crude the hard way in 2020. This book was written for the trader working today, on the instrument as it actually behaves today.CL has no duration, no conversion factor, no curve, its risk arithmetic is genuinely simpler than a rates instrument's, and this book shows you why, building a Risk Snapshot around Tick Value and Dollar-per-Point instead. What isn't simple is everything else: a report calendar split between the API's Tuesday-afternoon private survey and the EIA's Wednesday-morning official number, a monthly roll cycle that never stops being relevant, and a term-structure vocabulary, contango and backwardation, that tells you more about the physical oil market than any chart pattern will. You'll also learn exactly why CL settles into physical delivery at Cushing, Oklahoma while its smaller sibling, MCL, settles financially and never carries that risk at all, and you'll build the WTI/Brent spread as a genuine relative-value trade grounded in real contract specs.Full trade case studies carry every mechanic from report day through the physical roll into complete, worked executions, the way a desk actually trades this contract, not the way a textbook describes it.