Introduction to FuturesPlus

hi there my name is mrs. Nava and I'm the director of education here at TradeStation this video is an introduction to the TradeStation futures plus platform together with trading technologies we've developed a robust and powerful futures options trading experience our presenter today is Bernie Schwartz he's a director of platform services at trading technologies and an expert on all things related to futures plus so let's turn the floor over to Bernie hello everyone this is a introductory presentation an overview of the futures plus trading platform today we're going to go over some basic functionality dip a little bit into some advanced functionality but we're going to talk about the futures plus platform and how you can use it to execute futures and options and track the positions and those instruments what we've got here is a very basic workspace pulled up I have a market grid displaying a couple of contracts that I've selected an MD trader or do M as it's often called to display the market in the ESDS contract and a chart here for crude oil I'm going to back up a little bit started here with a pretty basic look but we're going to start with the basics we're gonna talk about how to search and find contracts how to place orders and modify orders place an amend them how to track your positions once they have been filled and then we're going to talk a little bit about options the tools that can be used for options trading spread trading and some some brief notes on charting this again is intended to be an overview of the platform there there are many features that we can go into this will be sort of what the basics the need to know so I'm going to start by talking about the workspace itself which is what you see here each when you open a workspace you have the opportunity to customize it in many different ways any way you like I'm going to start by talking about selecting a product and then we'll see the widgets thick that can be used with those products and and how they can be how they can be customized and configured so I'm going to minimize this chart to to eliminate some of the clutter on the screen here and same thing with the do I'm here I've got a market grid with a couple of contracts already selected yes DCs March two front months for the es future crude D screwed Jam the two front months for the crude future I put these in ahead of time before this this overview there are a couple of different ways that you can search for and locate a product the most common way is through the Explorer the search bar up top here now if you know the product symbol that you're looking for this makes it very easy we use exchange symbology so if if I wanted to take a look at the gold market for instance and I know the contract symbol is GC I can type that into Explorer and we see we've got all these selections for for gold for each month we also have the spreads available and then there are a couple of gold related products that are up there and you'll see there are a couple pages here so if you know the product symbol that makes it very easy we also do have smart search so if you are do not know the products to most specifically but for instance if I want to trade silver here I can type that into my Explorer and I can see that week I can bring up the silver contracts in any month within them once I've selected once I know the contract that I want to trade if I want to trade silver geese I can use our icons here to pull up any widgets the display that silver contract so I'm going to use I'm gonna hover over this is MD trader or as we call it a do M or latter single click on that will bring up an MD trader for the contract that I've selected so I've got silver DS here we see in in RMB trader the display of the market bids are on the left side offers on the right hand side this is live market data that we're in simulation this is live data from the CM e in this case and we can see that the bid is 1702 offered at 1702 half for 230 and you can see that quantity is updating there and we'll get into in a moment how to place an order and how to in order who talked about how to search for products from the using smart search and using product symbol you can also use this Explorer button and you can see here that I've got two two exchanges for which I have access CME and iced Auto spreader and aggregator allow us to create custom instruments which probably won't be a part of this demonstration for for now we'll go the the basic route but if I know I want to trade a CMU contract and again we'll use future and let's go ahead and use gold as our example again GC we can again see that if I want to trade gz DS I can I can bring up any of these widgets that contain that so let's let's bring up market grid for for for gold for the GCD so I'm just like market grid and select and here I've got us a new market grid with just the one contract in it additional ways to search for contracts within a market grid this can be kind of a Homebase double click in an empty row we'll bring up the same Explorer search bar that you see at the top here and you've got the same smart search capabilities and you've got the same explore capabilities there is no you didn't need not limit yourself to one market gripper exchange if I want to put an ice product into this market grid I am free to do that I can pull up for example BRM is the front month Bretton contract I can pull that into market grid as well in addition if if you don't want to limit yourself to one expiration one one instrument for product you can bring up the entire complex so if I go to my Explorer bar and I search for let's say es up at the top here I've got all my es futures and with one click I can select them all put them all into a market grid and this is the entire es complex now I've got a couple of different market grids up here what you'll notice down at the bottom of each of these is that there's there's a tab so in the case that I selected a product we name the tab for you in the case that you're creating a view into the market on your own you have the opportunity to to rename those tabs there's a lot of flexibility in terms of widgets so I can certainly if I want to whoops I can rename this and call it monitoring for example and I can add another tab perhaps I want to I'm gonna call that one metals and in my new tab I can now search for all the instruments I want so I'm gonna go ahead and add my gold contracts here and I've got that my metals tab and I can easily switch back and forth again a lot of flexibility here so these tabs can be broken out and you can create a new market grid with just that tab it can easily be recombined simply by dragging and just like with this SNP market grid that I brought up before I can go ahead and drag that tab into the into the market grid as well and of course I can move them around and put them in whatever whichever order I like in addition we've got a functionality called clone so I can clone this widget if I like the way it looks and I want to have a repeat or something similar I can clone that widget create another one for myself this becomes particularly handy when we get into various workspace windows so for example your word in my workspace here I'm looking at one window it's called futures I can if I like create another window I've created a couple here orders and positions spreads I can add a new window and let's just call it demo and the nice thing so now we see we have a blank window but the nice thing about this functionality is that I get to send these widgets back and forth between windows so if I'm using this cloned widget that I've just created I can right-click on the widget and send to the any-any window that's in my workspace since I just created demo I'll send it there and we'll see that it's now in my demo window there's a lot of functionality in terms of widgets cloning workspace functionality windows etc in addition if you don't like the names they're displayed here you have the ability to rename a widget so if I want to call this my monitoring market grid I can do so easily and it is now referenced in my in my icon selection so when I go to look it up we'll see it's still got the monetary-market grid there now that we have a couple of examples of how to view how to search for contracts let's talk about the data that is contained here once we do select that contract so let's look at est s for example this is the front month yes future are currently we can see the bid and offer we can see the quantities on the bid and offer quantities volume on the day settlement price high and low all their standard market data there are many many more columns that are available to add and these can be customized and saved with your workspace so if change on the day is something you want to monitor if bid and offer headcount to something you want to monitor all of that is available to you in indicative settle etc and again these can be customized to your workspace and any any columns that you select will be retained in that widget and saved well we're most interested in of course is the is the market itself the bid in the offers let's talk about how to place a trade highlighted in red and blue are our bids and offers or I should say background red and blue a single click on a bit or an offer is going to bring up an order entry widget in this case it's an mb trader so a single click on the on the bid or offer brings up the market and now i have a view into the depth of market i am going to place an order I'm going to place a buy 3088 buy for one let's see if we can get filled so I'm going to select my quantity here or place a bid for a one lot I'm going to click on the now that the market has dipped below I want to show this working I'm going to go ahead and been 87 instead we see that the market is not quite reached there today although we're heading down in that direction I've selected my quantity a single left click on the bid side will my bid I'm working the 3087 bid for a one lot and we can see that movement of the market as my order works to amend that order is very straightforward a right-click and drag if I want to drag this down maybe I want to bid 86 now right click and drag down to 86 and I can amend the order that way and you can see them still working 1b0 I've bought one I'm working one but excuse me bought zero and I'm working one if I want to move it back up of course I can do that a single left click will cancel the order so for ease of use we have single click order is canceled I now have nothing working in this market and of course I can put in as many orders as I want or as as I'm allowed to I can set my right here I'm setting my default quantity to one so now anytime I click in the bid or the offer it's going to seed with a one lot so I can bid a six I can be five half all the way down and of course the same applies on the offer side so if I want to offer one at ninety one at ninety half one at ninety one we can monitor all our orders this way we talked about left click to cancel an order but of course we also have some shortcuts I can cancel all my buys or all my cells or of course I can cancel all orders from the ladder itself when we do have a working order with a widget called the order book which is going to help you monitor multiple orders at once so let's take a look at what working lor looks like an order book again you have the ability to set these columns any way you want and retain whatever whatever fields you do or don't want to see in your order book but let's take a look at what working orders look like in the order book so I'm going to follow the same procedure and I'll go ahead and bid 87 for 1 and 86 for one and I'll offer one at 91 so we can see in our order book all the details of those orders displayed we talked about how to amend orders from the order entry widget from the envy trader you can do the same actions from the order book itself so for example if you want to if you want to move more than one order at a time the order book is perfect for that let's start with one order so if I select this sell order that I'm working one to sell and ninety-one even I can tick that up or down let's go ahead and take that order up to ninety one half and hit change and we'll see that I'm now working a ninety one half offer on this future I can change quantity from here as well go ahead and make that a three lot well go ahead make that three a lot go and now I'm working the three lot at ninety one half as I mentioned this can also help you multiply modify multiple orders at a time so if I want to modify both of these bids and take them both up or can't cancel cancel one or both or tick up or down so now I've selected these bids I can tick them both up and we see that our orders are adjusting on the ladder over there so I pick them up take them back down if I want down further or of course I can simply cancel those orders from the order book depending on your preference you can use the display of market to to monitor to manage your orders or you can use order book to do the same they both will give you the same functionality order book will give you the chance to to modify multiple orders at a time this so far I've had a couple of working orders in there let's see what happens when we actually take a fill I am going to start by opening my fills widget which is going to track every fill that I have and I will place that at the bottom here and I'm also going to open my positions with it which is going to track all of my open positions and there's a couple of a couple of Canadian dollar instruments in there but we'll will hide those for the time being and we'll just focus on the product at hand here which is ESDS so again I'm gonna go ahead and enter an order and I'm gonna take a film let's we're gonna see what happens so I'll go ahead and enter an 86 bit on one working here in the ladder and we see working in the order book as well I'm going to amend this order up so that I'm so that I buy this one so again I'm gonna right click and drag this up to 86 75 okay I got filled this is simulation of course but this is live market data so let's take a look at what what it looks like once that order has been filled hey you see that we're no longer working anything in our order book this is blank our order has been filled we see here on the unbe trader that our quantity we are now long 1 that is my position in this instrument so we display the VMD trader and we display it in our positions widget as well so es dese s odious start of day I had none when the day began I bought one my average buy price was 86 75 of course if I have multiple orders the average will calculate on the fly and we can see my live P&L so my net position is up 1 and the market has gone against me just take our to sum down $25 on that order in our fills widget we see similar information I've got a summary view here probably the most useful mode of fill widget is detail so you can see every fill that you take but you have the opportunity to look at summary you can look by order so you can isolate each order if you choose and continuous will show us our fills going back going back quite a ways futures plus uses cloud storage for all non latency-sensitive information so things like historical fills historical actions are all stored so this information is available to you from that from the time you you begin using the platform until the present all that information is retained and available to you at any time for now let's go back to our detail view so I can see that just got filled in my one line mark has moved against me a little bit further let's see what happens if we close out that position so I'm going to go ahead and take is fifty to sixty two dollar loss on this instrument I'm gonna say I'm gonna sell one now up to now I've shown how to place limit orders you do have the ability to place market orders of course and worth noting here - I'm gonna do a receptor now the markers moved against us spaceball or recenter it's worth noting that that clicking in you know in the bitter offer where there there's an it clicking in the bid where there are active offers you're clicking in the offer where they're active bids will fill your order immediately so I'm gonna go ahead and so I've got one long I'm gonna go ahead and sell one if I click anywhere in the in the offer column here I'm gonna get filled it the best price of course so I'm gonna click sell one and I got filled at thirty 85 so we can see here I sold 130 85 I and my summary my positions widget I bought one I sold one my net position is zero I'm flat that's also reflected here in my position in my display of market we can see my average buy was 86 and the orders my average sell was 85 even I lost eighty seven dollars and fifty cents on that trade when we talk about the P&L calculation there are several different ways that you can calculate your P&L so if I go into my positions widget settings we can determine the calculation that we use for our P&L configuration now the by far the most common usages ltp waterfall net stands for last traded price waterfall so what that means is we will use the last traded price as the first as the first indicator of how to price our options and we then go through a waterfall prices if there is no last traded price available we will use mid-market if there's only one side available we use the bid or the offer and the last the last price in there is the settlement price so we'll go down the most relevant list of price inputs to determine the P&L in a very liquid market like this one last traded price will be used most often that's how our P&L is calculated closing a position can be even easier than this for example if I open if I go ahead and open a position in in the SPS here and so now I've bought one again I've now we can see now I've bought two on the day and sold one so I'm long one if I have several positions in in my account and perhaps I don't have access to the ladder at the moment because I've closed it we can see here I'm long one a right click on that instrument will allow me to open MB trader and I can see that I'm long one there and I can easily sell that out so closing positions becomes very easy as well from the positions widget then we see again I've bought two in the day I've sold two on the day I've lost $100 on the day and our fills reflect the same but you see now here we've got our average buy is now updated with both of those orders the average sells updated with both those orders and of course that information is available to you throughout the day we talked a little bit of it now that we've talked about fills and how to take them we mentioned earlier grouping widgets excuse me widget configuration then wanna talk very briefly about grouping widgets if I right click in any widget I can create group widget and you see we've got our color-coded edges to line up what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to group my MD trader with my market grid when I do that the two widgets talk to each other and share information and I'll show you what I mean by that so if I drag my colors over line them up green with green we can see our two widgets are highlighted I've got my market grid and my MB trader and I'm going to group them to create one widget now the advantage of this is as I mentioned the that we just can communicate to each other so right now I'm looking at the ESDS contract if I were to choose instead to trade the marsh contract I can click on the March instrument my market grid and we'll see that the market in my MD trader is now displaying March same thing for all the tabs that I created earlier so metals tab where I have gold I can now select my gold DS contract if I want to trade that now and you'll see that the display here is now gold I'm going to go ahead and take a fill on a gold contract as well I'm gonna pay fourteen seventy five on one and we'll just let that sit there for a minute so we can monitor our position so I've closed my es position now I've opened a Gold position we talked briefly about the historical information that's available in the fills widget want to mention quickly that we have audit trail widget which can be very helpful because this will log all of your actions not only your fills but any mod any order modifications you you make there's a whole lot of detail in here you can scroll back and see every action that you've taken within the platform so if you ever a question about when was this order amended when did I you know take when did I increase my quantity when did I decrease my quantity all that information is available to you and your audit trail and again it's stored for as long as you like so we've talked mostly about futures so far but futures plus also two plus we also offer options on futures analytics and execution so I'm going to talk about options chain and and an options execution for a little bit in my widget menu I can search for in my options submenu I've got options chain option chain acts like a market grid for options and again we were presented with our Explorer when I open up option chain to select my options instrument what's different here an option chain is that we use product families so for some for some products that trade with many different symbols weeklies dailies etc we've grouped those all into into a product family so everything that uses to sit the same underlying contract will be in the same family for example if we look at our es product family we can see that we've got a number of different options symbols that all fall under es we've got our weekly options week one two three and four the UW's the end of the month option and there are even dailies now he won a these or Monday options the C's are Wednesday options well he grouped them all under the es fam for ease of searching for the purposes of this I'm just going to use the most basic contract I'm just gonna use the ESDS option we'll select that and we'll take a look at our option chain there's a lot going on here first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to right click and fit all columns to content so I can see also I'm not cutting off any decimals and what we have here in our option chain is a very standard view into the option market so we're now looking at ESDS options we see up top here the feed the underlying future is the dese contract that was the one on his trading earlier and we see the market for the underlying future for our options we've got strikes listed down the middle calls on the left and puts on the right we've also got Delta called Delta put Delta a couple different measures of volatility and if if you are interested in seeing additional Greeks those columns are available to you as well the Vega Gamma theta and we have secondary greeks available as well Vanna Bulma and Delta decay those can all be added as columns and customized as you want and of course you can move those columns around within your within your chain and reorder maybe I want to see my implied volunteer for whatever reason that's all customizable as well when executing an option the exact same functionality is in play as was for futures so a single click on a bit or an offer will bring up my order entry widget in this case an mb trader so I clicked on the 30 60 put and we see the market in the we see the the market and the MD trader wider of course on options and we see our theoretical value here highlighted in green similarly if I group my MD trader with my option chain I have the same capability as we had with the grouped market grid is to say that if I switch contracts now I want to look at the third the market in the 30 25 foot I can click on that and my MD trader will update with that market or any call any put you've got the same capabilities there the same functionality applies with tabs in the option chain if I click this plus to add a new tab it's going to give me the next the next month available in the product I'm looking at so when I click this tab I'm going to see es March and if I were to keep clicking yes June I would see more and more you are not constrained by product or by even by exchange in these tabs so I can easily change the bike and remove these tabs I can change the product I can do whatever I want perhaps I want to look at in the same options chain I want to look at Nasdaq futures and Q is the symbol and I can have my Nasdaq options up as well and again not constrained by exchange so if I want to see a different product again at ice maybe I want to see cotton I can pull those up in the same option chain and I've got the same flexibility with moving moving my tabs around breaking them out reordering them etc entering orders the exact same for options this is for futures so if I click now I'm looking at Nasdaq DS options I click on the Nasdaq 80 to put our market is very wide here we've got a whole lot of ticks but if I want to buy let's go ahead and buy a 5 lot of these 8200 puts offered at 143 in the orders so I'll go ahead and buy that 5 lot so again the same functionality in terms of placing orders amending them we see that I bought 5 Nasdaq DS 8200 puts my fills widget here and we see my position here in my positions widget the market has again gone against me so I am long 5 of these and I'm down $250 on this trade and if they're wide net out we'll see they default the full Dame in the contract again if I want to quickly get out of this position right click to open an MB trader if I didn't already have it up and I'm long 5 this time I'm just gonna sell 5 at the market to close my position you see that our cursor now is the yellow it has the yellow market highlight over it to call out call your attention so you don't have an accidental trade there and I'm gonna sell 5 at the market so I bought for 140 375 I sold for 141 that trade is down 275 dollars on the day so we've executed an option we've executed a future well we have not talked about yet is spreads so I'm going to talk very briefly about future spreads and then about options strategies as well so our futures spreads we've got a very similar search function in the same search functionality so if I want to trade a futures spread let's say I want to take a look at the CL futures market crude oil market so earlier I demonstrated how to bring all the crude outright futures into a market grid and that's very easy to do but if I look again here in my search bar we see that I've got the spreads here as well that's our little icon for spreads clicking on a market grid for CL spreads it's going to give me every future spread that's available to trade and see how complex same execution capabilities on spreads so if I want to trade this DS fab calendar I can see that that that spread is one bit at - I'm gonna go ahead and buy a - lot in this case I'll pay 2 cents for a - lot of the DS fab calendar now I have my confirmation with my confirmation box turned off a lot of people when it comes to particularly when it comes to spreads and strategies want to see their confirmation before they place the trade so we have that available as well so now if I go and try and buy this - lot for 2 cents I'm going to get a confirmation pop-up and this is particularly helpful with spreads because I can see that if I if I continue with this order I'm gonna buy two of the DS I'm gonna sell two of the fehb to execute this spread am I sure yes let's confirm great I've now bought 2 CL DS Feb calendar spreads if we look at our fills we can see that I have bought two calendar spreads and we give you the leg breakdown as well so I bought two DS futures I sold two fab futures and in my positions window the same as is displayed so I'm long to of that calendar and we'll break it down bed legs for you as well and you can choose whether they should display those spread positions or not or if you'd simply rather display the legs this is where the buy order functionality can be helpful so again by order I just bought two spreads I don't need to see the legs necessarily detail will give me all the legs same functionality applies for option strategies so I'm going to do a very brief lookup of some active options active options strategies and will execute one or two of them to have a look at what what those look like so if I want to let's let's choose a new product here let's go let's go back to silver and our favorite s o is the symbol for the options and I can pull up all active strategies as our icon for strategies I can pull all pull up all active strategies in this product as well in the market grid now there are dozens perhaps hundreds of active strategies so I'll just choose a basic one and execute one let's find a simple straddle or strangle there's a Jan 1550 1835 strangle again click on the bitter offer to bring up my order entry widget we can see my theoretical value here highlighted in green I'm gonna go ahead and sell this time since I've been buying everything today let's sell a 5 lot of this of this strangle so again we're gonna get our confirmation box and particularly helpful when it comes to option strategies I'm going to sell 5 strangles which means I'll be selling 5 Jan 15 half puts 5 Jan 18 35 calls yes I confirm that and I have executed a 5 lot of my silver strangle so we see the same same display here I've got the summary of my strangle in my positions I'm short 5 of those and the leg breakdown short five calls short 5 puts same detail in the fills widget as well when I open this workspace I had a chart pulled up so I'm going to talk very briefly about charting and and how it can be used how you can use it effectively so let's go back to a very basic contract I'll open up a new market grid with my es futures in it and let's take a look at what charts look like so there are a couple different ways to open a chart I can right click on this instrument here Dease 19 and if I right click I see I've got all these various widgets that I can open so I can very easily from there open a chart and this is going to do our default is candlestick with a one-minute interval but you've got a whole lot of options to change that so if I open up our menu here and pin it I've got a candlestick chart up right now this is for ESDS I can easily make that a bar chart if I prefer I prefer line charts personally so all that is available to you Mountain etc so you can change the chart type if you choose interval is also up to you as well one minute is the default but certainly you might want to see a 60 minute chart some people like to look the longer-term charts that's available to you as well and we've got a number of technical indicators now this list is far too long to go through on this demonstration but certainly just about every technical indicator that that would be interesting to charters is available here so I can drag whoops so you can see if I start moving down this chart we've got literally hundreds of them in here so you've got you've got a whole a whole lot of whole lot of options when it comes to charting charting me comes useful as well when we use grouped widgets so again I'm going to take my chart and now group it with my mb trader and in the same fashion i can now switch between products to view the chart for that product if i want to add a new one in here let's go ahead and add CL there's all my CL futures I can now look at a CL chart in addition if I like for any month and within the chart itself I can add a comparison so perhaps I want to look at my CL chart versus heating oil so I can add a heating oil overlay and I can see how one relates to the other you can add up to four products to compare it comes to charting in some of these widgets these are they become incredibly complex and there's far more than what can be explained on a demonstration like this so I'll point out that in the top in the upper right hand corner of every widget is a help icon clicking on that question mark single left click will bring you to the help article on the widget and this is incredibly useful while trading after market etc this will give you a breakdown of everything that is in the chart or for example if I want to do the same for positions if I had questions about what each column measure showed in positions single click will bring me to the help article and positions and again there's a whole lot of information here that you can click around and use how pino is calculated we talked about the LTP waterfall and each each article has a reference section which will tell you exactly what each of the columns are how they're defined and this is available to you of course at any time I'm gonna end this demonstration there as an overview of the futures plus platform there's far more to to explore here and we wish you the best of luck in your trading thanks very much Thank You Bernie that was an excellent presentation but we have only scratched the surface of how TradeStation futures plus can empower your trading I encourage you to explore all the other features that Trajan has to offer and how TradeStation can help you take your trading to the next level to learn more please visit us at www.resumeserviceplus.com I hope to see you there

Channel: TradeStation

Views: 15,066

Keywords: yt:quality=high, online trading, TradeStation, Jesus Nava, Introduction to FuturesPlus, FuturesPlus, FP, Futures Options, Trading Futures Options, Trading Platform

Id: FjZoymE3GyM

Length: 38min 18sec (2298 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020