This tutorial will stop through entering a Futures trade into Stator Professional version. The example trade will be for the Share Price Index (SPI).
The following trade will be entered into Stator:
(Please note the trade details are purely theoretical)
Contract Specifications:
Contract Name: SPI 200 Index
Contract Size (per Contract): 25 x ASX200 Index
Minimum Tick Size and Value: 1.00, worth AUD$25
Trade Details
Contracts: 2
Entry Price: 4580
Fixed Cost per Contract: $2000
Commission/Brokerage: $50
Entering the Trade
Stator provides functionality to allow you to enter futures contract trades of many differing specifications. Futures are leveraged instruments and a small outlay can provide an enormous market exposure which can dramatically increase the profit potential.
Of course, with a leveraged trade comes increased risk and Stator also provides all the tools required to properly manage your trading risk.
For this example, we will enter the trade using the Position Sizing screen, this is shown below:
1. Select "No Model" from the money management model dropdown. For this trade we will not calculate the position size as it is already known.
2. Select "Futures" from the Instrument dropdown.
3. Enter the Index value for the trade entry and also the number of contracts.
4. Enter the futures specific settings
(See below for more information)
5. Click on the "Calculate" button to calculate the position size.
6. Proceed through trade confirmation screens to complete the trade entry.
FUTURES SPECIFIC SETTINGS
For additional information please refer to Stator Help file topic:
Advanced Concepts/Instruments FAQ/Info for Index & Futures
Fixed cost per contract:
Stator allows you to nominate if the initial margin for the futures trade is derived as a function of the market value of the trade or if a fixed cost per contract is used.
In this example trade, an initial margin of $2000 is paid for each contract.If this option is left unticked, the "Leverage %" field becomes enabled. This allows you to specify a leverage percentage which will be used to determine the value of the initial margin for the trade.
per Contract Point Move:
This setting specifies the dollar value move per point for a single contract. For this example SPI trade the value of each contract rises or falls $25 with each movement in the underlying Index value.
Point Units:
Use this setting to specify the precision of each point move. In this example trade the minimum move for the index is one point. For example if the minimum index move is 0.01 then the pint units setting will be 0.01.
COMPLETING THE TRADE ENTRY
Complete the details required in the first trade confirmation screen.
Please note that the code/symbol used in this example is AXJO which is the code used by Yahoo!Finance for the ASX200 Index. It is important to use the same code which is used by Yahoo!Finance if you wish to take advantage of the online price updates included within Stator.
Another important point to note is that this futures trade is based on the ASX200 Index. As a result of this the exchange should be assigned to "World Indices", this is important for the online price updates function to ensure that the correct index price is obtained for the AXJO symbol.
Once you have completed all the information on this confirmation screen you can click on the "Submit" button. This will bring up the final trade confirmation screen and will allow you to submit the trade into the Stator database.
