Time in Force Explained
Time in force is the order parameter most often left at whatever the platform defaults to — and it is the only one that says what happens when an order does not fill.
Tag
futures
Every StaxInvesting article tagged futures · 18 posts.
18 articles
What Is a Trailing Drawdown?
Under intraday trailing, an unrealised high you never converted still raises your floor — which means traders fail while their realised results are positive. It is the rule most often misread, and the misreading happens during a breach.
What Is a Prop Firm?
The detail most content glosses over is that these accounts are typically simulated and the firm's revenue comes substantially from evaluation fees. That is a structural fact, not an accusation — and it changes how a pass rate should be read.
Futures Automation via TradingView Webhooks
The webhook mechanics are the same. What changes is that the payload must name a contract month, the day boundary is not midnight, rollover produces signals expressing no view, and an endpoint that fails at 2 AM loses alerts nobody will tell you about.
What Changes When You Automate Futures vs Options
The signal logic usually transfers. Everything around it does not — and the parts that differ are the parts that fail expensively, starting with a sizing routine that computes risk from the wrong number entirely.
Futures vs Options for Day Trading
The tax comparison is the one most articles get wrong. Futures receive 60/40 treatment, but so do broad-based index options — so the line runs between Section 1256 instruments and everything else, not between futures and options.
Why Futures Never Had a PDT Rule
The reason is jurisdictional rather than philosophical. For 25 years that split made futures the standard workaround for undercapitalised day traders — a role that ended in June 2026, which is worth reconsidering from first principles.
Leverage in Futures vs Options
Calling both of these leverage obscures more than it explains. The question is not which has more — it is which failure mode you are accepting: loss by magnitude, or loss by expiry.
Futures Market Hours and the Trading Session
Nearly-continuous access sounds like an unambiguous advantage. It is more accurately a different shape of market, with hours that behave nothing alike — and a day boundary that breaks daily counters written for equities.
Futures Margin Explained
Options traders arrive with the wrong mental model. An options buyer pays a premium and owns something; a futures trader posts collateral and owes performance — and the loss is not capped by what was posted.
Futures Rollover Explained
Rollover has no options equivalent, and it is the futures mechanic most likely to catch an automated system written for options — starting with the fact that it generates order activity expressing no view at all.
E-mini vs Micro Futures
This is the most useful fact for a smaller account entering futures, and it has no options equivalent — you cannot buy a tenth of an option contract. But ten micros cost ten commissions for identical exposure.
Futures Contract Specifications Explained
Options traders arrive at futures with no vocabulary for this. There is no premium and no strike — there is a specification sheet, and the three numbers on it determine your dollar risk per contract.
How to Automate Futures Trading
The credential work takes an afternoon. The validation determines whether the setup is one you should trade — and the futures-specific part is that a process which stops overnight has stopped trading without telling you.
What Is a Futures Trading Bot?
The bot is execution. Whether it makes money depends entirely on the rules it is given — and most of the value in an automated system was created before any code ran.
Automated Futures Trading: A Complete Guide
Futures automation shares infrastructure with options automation and almost none of its vocabulary. This is the map — contract specs, rollover, posted margin, and a session that barely closes.
Copy Trading and Taxes
There is no distinct tax treatment for a trade because a provider suggested it. What matters is what was traded — and the gap between index options and ETF options on identical economic exposure is large enough to belong in provider comparison.
Copy Trading Futures
CME Globex runs roughly 23 hours a day, which means signals arrive while you are asleep and manual copying cannot participate in a large share of the session. It also means the same trade fills very differently at 10 AM than at 3 AM.