I usually flow with the volume - preferring to trade the month(s) with the highest volume. You will notice a lot more gaps in prices in months that don't have sufficent volume. As far as the last day you can trade a contract, I think that depends more on your broker than CME as usually your brokers expriration date will be before the official CME date. Hope that helps
Yeah, I agree with you. A little too much information on that website. Here's how you can find out about the CBOT products. Go to: i) wwww.cbot.com ii) select the contract you want from the right hand column (for my exercise I choose Corn) iii) go to the Contract Information column to the far right of the new page. iv) select Futures Contract Specs to get the 411 on any of the CBOT/CME Group contracts that you want to trade.
etc. Thanks. I mine data from the CBOT website on a daily basis and I do have the contract specs. I think I did not ask my question right. I want to know what the convention is for the pit to move to the front month as the contract to trade. e.g. for YM - Dow mini (as for other equity futures), the nearby becomes the front month on Thursday of the week preceding the expiry week of the contract month. I think this is more a convention than a contract spec, which only talks about Last Trading Day, Delivery and Settlement and so forth. I know CBOT's quote page always gives the front month price in the short table. This is currently showing May 08 for corn (and Dec 08 for mini Corn!!!) All I want to know is on which trading day it changed from March to May. This is pretty obvious in index futures because of volume and Open Interest changes on the roll-over day. Not so obvious in grains and other commodities. Should have kept track of this on CBOT website, but I was not interested in grains at the time. Hopefully CBOT will maintain the site a while longer - I think the CME Group site is not fully functional on what they call "legacy CBOT products"
I see. I looked and it doesn't have the info. Check with your brokerage, they should be able to give you the exact info. Regards,
All spec trading is officially over before FND, but the transition to the new "front month" usually follows the Goldman roll. There is no specific official date other than FND. There will also be some variance depending on if the next contract month is a new crop, etc, depending on whether the specs will squeeze every last dime out of the current crop.