Continuous Contracts

A continuous futures contract is a synthetic, long-term price chart created by "stitching together" a series of individual futures contracts. It is not a real, tradable instrument itself, but rather a representation of the active, front-month contract in the underlying root symbol at any given time.

The continuous futures contract symbol for ES futures can be represented as ES1!, the root contract symbol followed by 1!. As of this writing, ES1! represents or maps to ES 09-25, the active front-month.

As the front-month contract nears expiration, trading volume and open interest shift to the next contract in the series (e.g., from the September contract to the December contract), usually several days or weeks before the current contract stops trading. When this happens, the continuous contract will shift automatically to the next expiration.

CrossTrade uses NT8's internal rollover information to determine the active front-month and the roll date of the current contract.

Examples of valid continuous contracts:

• ES1!

• NQ1!

• MES1!

• MNQ1!

• MBT1!

• etc.

Important Note: Continuous contracts are only available in XT add-on version v1.8.3+. CrossTrade only supports representation of the active front-month, e.g., ES1!.

Do I need to use continuous contracts?

No, you do not. The benefit of continuous contracts is you only have to create the alert message for your strategy once and won't have to modify them every time the contract rolls into a new expiration. You can still hard-code an instrument name as ES 09-25, ES SEP25, or ESU5, if you wish.

During the expiration and rollover process, TradingView will update the continuous contract only after the new front-month surpasses the volume of the old contract. Because of this, there can be a miscommunication between platforms during this transition period if you update NT8 prior to the shift. We recommend either hard-coding the contract in your alerts, or delaying the update of your NT8 database until you know TV has shifted to the new front-month. CrossTrade uses your NT8 database settings as the source of truth and can not automatically update this for you. The volume shift usually occurs after the close on the rollover date, but could be the following day. Please prepare for contract rollovers accordingly.

Example Payload

The following command will place a market buy order in continuous contract ES1! under the Sim101 account:

key=your-secret-key; command=PLACE; account=Sim101; instrument=ES1!; action=BUY; qty=1; order_type=MARKET; TIF=DAY;