Good morning, and welcome! This morning, to Trading Futures, another great webcast from Schwab Coaching. My name is Ben Watson. I'm an education coach and senior manager here at Charles Schwab, and I'm joined out there in the chat by my good friend, Michael Fairbourn, who sometimes teaches this class and in fact will be teaching this class for me next Thursday as well. But Michael's a 20-plus year veteran in the financial markets. He's here to help answer any questions you might have along the way. Sorry for the quick technical issues, but we're going to get rocking and rolling here really quickly, and we're going to talk a little contango tango and a little bit of backwardation this morning as we take a look at what's going on in some of the futures markets, and we'll see how perhaps some of this wild and crazy weather has been impacting some of the commodities.
We'll take a look at that as we jump into this discussion. A couple of quick housekeeping items as we get started this morning. Again, remember that everything we talk about simply for illustrative and educational purposes only, first and foremost, is not a recommendation of any kind of strategy or particular instrument or particular approach. Everything is simply for illustrative and educational purposes only. Remember that futures and futures options trading involves substantial risk. It's not suitable for all investors. Make sure that you're aware of the characteristics and risks of trading. Make sure that you read the risk disclosure statement for futures and options prior to trading futures products. Recognize that they require separate trading options. Make sure that you're aware of deferred futures opportunities.
If you feel the same way, use your facilities; or mermaid sold really well, take care of your securities. We will be in a rental mode, about $13 for whoever bought up the tickets with me. Some of you are still in the real flip side of this; you're not planning to put your money up for a private agency orORA and talk to us about that device's prices. Probably, probably, what's going to happen. They're all theoretical in nature. So make sure that you're aware of that. And remember that there's the potential to lose money in the market. And in futures trading and futures contracts, being a leveraged environment, there's potential for substantial loss. Now, we're going to be using the Thinkorswim desktop software platform today, specifically the paper money application.
It is for educational purposes only. It's a great learning environment, a great sandbox to play in and learn, but it is not a guarantee of future success out there in the real world. Also, remember that investing involves risk, including for some products in the futures world, more than your initial investment. Also, remember that stop orders, when we talk about futures, don't necessarily behave the same way that a stop order does on an equity position due to exchange rules based on certain conditions at the time of activation. The exchange rules are based on certain conditions at the time of activation. The exchange may reject or substitute an exchange-designated limit order for the originally triggered market order based on their protection points. We'll talk about those in this discussion as we get into that thought process.
So again, my thanks to Michael Fairborn for being here. Welcome to all of you that are joining me on a regular basis. We're going to take a look at our contract asset classes in the futures market. We're going to discuss what's going on with futures, and we're going to look at some example trades. And my focus today is going to be really two areas kind of beyond our broader market overview. We're going to take a look at some commodity futures. Specifically, we're going to look at crude oil, which we've looked at before as kind of a commodity perspective. We're going to look at some corn futures in the ag commodity space, and we might even throw in a little bit of currency futures. Again, remember the currency futures carry with them some additional risks.
There's risks of intermarket analysis, the risks of geopolitical circumstances and trading on different markets. So we're going to take a look at that here as well as we get into the discussion. So let's pop over to the thinkorswim desktop software platform here this morning. We're going to take a look at the forward slash ES to get us started, taking a look at kind of the overall market performance here. Now, this is the e-mini contract. Looking at it simply from a market performance standpoint. So we're using the forward slash ES here, not as a trading vehicle yet, but we're using this as a market overview perspective to kind of see what is going on. Sometimes we'll use the indexes themselves. This is the SPX corresponds with the forward slash ES.
We'll bring it here into the futures grid. And there's what's going on with the forward slash ES this morning. And I'm going to zoom in a little bit here. We saw that break above the 50 period simple moving average in the last couple of trading sessions. We see a little bit of what we might call an advanced block, meaning simply that the market's having a hard time pushing this particular futures market higher than this area. That's typically identified by candlesticks that have bodies either opening or closing prices at the tops of the bodies, not necessarily the wicks or the shadows, but the bodies of the candles kind of running into the same area. And that's kind of what we're seeing here in the last couple of days. So we have this push.
We have a little bit of an open right about the same level, then a little bit of a run to the downside. And you can see that this comes kind of right into this resistance area, right around the 61. 31 range, price-wise. So this is retracting back and that's corresponding also with maybe a little bit of a shift off of the kind of risk-on bullish momentum mode that the RSI has been in over the last couple of weeks. We're seeing that RSI kind of ticking back down a little bit. Now, the RSI works and it's kind of that chicken and egg approach. But the RSI works in relationship to where the candlesticks are closing versus the highs and lows.
If we start to see red or bearish candles that are closing down near the closing price, then you're going to start to see that RSI ticking back down. We've got a little bit of a red candle right now. That's what's giving us kind of this sideways pause in the RSI if you want to think about it from that standpoint, right? So as we start to see this move, maybe looking at a bit of some sideways, maybe some profit taking as it gets up near this resistance level after a big one, maybe some upside. So you're going to see a little bit of a red candle, and then you're going to see. Now, let's take a look at the Nasdaq and the NASDAQ a little bit stronger, kind of a little bit stronger breakup and not back up towards those highs yet necessarily up around that $22,500 level or $22,430 thereabouts, depending on where you want to put it.
We'll put it right up there about that $22,490 mark or so. And let's zoom in. We can see again that advanced block type of thing. Of candle, the tick down in the RSI may be losing a little bit of momentum. Now, AC asks a great question here, and this is kind of a, you know, do I prefer, you know, one particular flavor of ice cream versus another flavor of ice cream, right? So MACD, moving average convergence divergence, divergence, where we look at kind of that momentum pile, right? Especially when we look at a histogram. It works similarly, only in the sense that it derives its data from the price movement. So we can do this real quick here while we're talking about this. Let me pop over here to the Flask icon.
We'll go over here and go MACD. So I'm going to go to the studies section. We're going to add the MACD histogram. This is going to be the default, MACD histogram, but MACD is driven differently than the RSI. The RSI is a comparison between closing prices and highs and lows. The MACD is a comparison and a smooth comparison between two different moving averages, then a comparison between that and the difference between those moving averages. So it gets to the same thing, and you oftentimes will see similar types of scenarios, right? So look at what's going on here, right? So we have the RSI dipping down. We have the MACD giving us that negative momentum or that bearish momentum. It corresponds with what's going on with price. But now we start to see price moving higher. We see bullish or positive momentum in the MACD histogram, but lagging a little bit behind this moving average, or the RSI, giving us maybe the same perspective, but maybe not quite the same speed of the signal. So sometimes a faster, faster signal is better. Sometimes a slower signal is better. Like I said, it's
vanilla versus French vanilla, maybe in this particular case, is the way to look at it from an ice cream flavor standpoint, and maybe that's an approach. Now, MACD histogram, if we were to change this, let's just come back and do this real quick, and I don't want to get too deep, deep, deep into technicals because we've got some other resources. In fact, I'm going to ask Michael to find for me a link to the Getting Started with Technical Analysis series, webcast series, because Cameron and Barb, who've taught that series, go deep in depth into the differences between these indicators. So let's go to MACD, not my MACD, but let's go to M-A-C-D, and let's put on here just the regular MACD two lines, which incorporates the histogram, actually the regular MACD.
The MACD incorporates both histogram and the two line. And two line is showing you the smooth difference between the two moving averages compared to another moving average, right? So when you get those crossovers between those two lines, that's where you see the MACD crossing above or below that zero line. When you see the histogram piles or stack, moving lower or moving higher is when you see the difference or the distance between these two lines moving apart or coming closer together. So that's kind of what we're seeing here. We've seen a recent cross of the zero line, so across bullishly of the MACD with a bit of a pile build up in that histogram. So that's kind of the difference between those two technical indicators. We'll pop that off of there.
I'll have Michael find that webcast link so that you've got some additional resources. But let's go ahead and get started. So let's go ahead and get started. So let's zoom back out. And we'll take a look here really quickly at the Russell 2000, which is a little bit of the weakness here in the overall movement in terms of the three major futures contracts that define the indexes, right? So look at what's going on here. And from a technical analysis perspective, I kind of see this building up. We talked about this last week, right? We talked about the ES kind of running back down from this resistance at this 2298, 2300 level. And in fact, we looked at trading it from that level on that short term.
Now we've got to rally up through it, bouncing off of the 50-period simple moving average and pulling back in a little bit of a bull flag type of perspective. So let's zoom in. Pulling up, pull back into a bull flag. The question is, how do we know, how do we know that this is bouncing up off of that horizontal support level now? And is it just going to be a reversal back from the 50-period simple moving average? So this goes back to kind of price patterns. And this is kind of a characteristic of a bull flag type of price pattern. In fact, we taught, I taught a webcast that ended at the end of the year on trading flag patterns. That's now all rolled into the trading price patterns webcast, but the archives are still there.
So, you can go back into the archives and you can look for that and kind of get some definition of flag patterns. It's also something we teach in our live events. By the way, if you're in the Seattle area, coming up next week, we're going to be at the Bellevue; let me tell you, we're going to be at the Bellevue, the Westin Bellevue on Thursday the 30th and Friday the 31st. And we would love to have you come join us. There is still room available. You can go to schwab. com forward slash coaching to register for that event. And we'd love to have you join us for that event. But this is something that we teach, these flag patterns, in that context as well. So looking for that little bit of a bull flag.
So how do we know it's bouncing? Some traders are going to look for a move higher and a close above the high of the low candle in this pattern. So if we see a move above this candle that we see in yesterday's trading session or right now, excuse me, today's trading session, looking for a close above this range right here, looking for that bounce. To the upside, right? That would be kind of the bullish perspective here. Bearish perspective would be a break below that horizontal resistance at about that 23. 00 mark. Excuse me. Horizontal support was resistance. We talked a lot about it at a resistance level now acting as a potential support level here at that 23,00 mark. So that's kind of where we are from a major index, major futures contract perspective.
What I want to do now is I want to kind of shift this over to my single grid. And whoops, let me delete those lines here really quick. There we go. And I want to look at a couple of things that are going on. So I mentioned also that we were going to look at some commodities futures contracts. So I want to do that really quickly here as we're kind of scanning around. And then we'll go back and look at some of the drop down into our futures grid. We'll maybe look at placing some example trades on these instruments. So take a look. First of all, let's take a look at forward slash CL. This is the big crude oil contract, right?
And we've been talking about this and talking about this kind of looking at this resistance level up around the 78 to $80 range, $80 per barrel. You can see the size of this contract here and the label. This is the large contract. So tick value is 10 bucks. Point value is $1,000, which means our notional value in this contract is $75,790 at the moment. If we do forward slash MCL, which is the micro, you can see that drops it down by one-tenth. Same perspective, same trend. It's just the smaller contract. So let's go back to forward slash MCL. Forward slash CL. And you can kind of see this bounce down from this resistance area into another level of support. Now, the question is, well, wait a second.
We just talked about on the Russell 2,000, maybe kind of this flagpole pattern, right? Flagpole pullback and looking for a bounce. So this is something where, you know, you can see as we look at this crude contract, let me just kind of zoom in here. We can see that this is pulled back. And what really determines, you know, some of the viability of this particular flag might be how far it's pulled back. So one of the tools that flag traders oftentimes will use is kind of this Fibonacci perspective. And we can certainly use it here in a futures contract as well from a technical analysis perspective. So what I'm doing is I'm grabbing in my drawing tools, the Fibonacci retracements. And I'll tell you why I'm using retracements in just a second.
Because what I want to do is I want to define the Fibonacci retracements. And I'll tell you why I'm using retracements in just a second. Because what I want to do is I want to define this move, right? This move is from this high back down. And I'm going to make it, I mean, we could take it all the way down to this low. I could take it to this low right here. But I'm going to take it all the way down to this low back here, which is kind of the bigger, larger turn, right? And I'm going to drop my line right there. So T. Suas says, do we need to mark both mini and microcharts? Just analyze mini and trade MES. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing.
I'm going to take this line, and I'm going to take this line, and I'm going to take this line, and I'm going to take this line, and I'm going to take this line, and I'm going to take this line, and I'm going to take this line, and I'm going to mark up both if you want to. You could look at one versus the other. It's just convenience to be able to move to those different contract sizes. They're going to move not necessarily 100% in lockstep, but they are going to move very, very closely to one another. So you can analyze one and trade the other, or vice versa. It doesn't matter. Depends on what you want to accomplish.
So here's what I've done, is I've dropped this Fibonacci retracement, because I defined the move, as from zero starting point to 100 ending point of the move, right? If we were to do this as an extension, I would go the other direction, but I like to kind of define this from this standpoint. This is the bottom of the move. That's the zero. This is the top of the move. That's the 100% level of the move. That's the move that it made, right? And then the pullback then becomes the distance back in that move that it's gone, right? To what level it's pulled back. So we can say, hey, this is pulling back and finding support, kind of right at that 61. 8% level of support. That 61.
8% of the move gets us to kind of that area where we would expect to see support. Not a guarantee ever, but an area where from a technical analysis perspective, Fibonacci's would suggest that there's a level of support. You can also see that it was resistance once, twice. It was the midpoint of this big candle right here. So there are a lot of affirming and corroborating factors that would suggest that this level is a level of support. So the possibility of a bounce and a move higher here. And some, again, traders would look for a close above or a trade above the high of the low period. So depending on where we see it, today might be the low period, right? That so far. So trading above the high so far might be the entry signal.
So an upward move above the previous high or above maybe the first 30 minutes' high of the day might be something that could be a tradable entry point into a bullish trade on this particular contract. Now, here's the thing. You've got a pretty solid resistance level that we've discussed before. We've looked left to confirm right up around this $80 mark, kind of where that resistance is. There could be, again, another resistance. We don't know if it's breaking. We don't know if it's going to move forward yet, right? So yeah, and it looks like a fair amount of consolidation right at that 50 level for sure. So Isaiah, that's a great thought process in terms of managing or defining potential risk in the trade, or at least looking at where a trader might take the trade off from that perspective, right?
And if it breaks below that 50% consolidation range, exit the position if it's long, exit the position if it goes up to that resistance, or take part of the position and let it continue to move higher. So we're going to think about that here in just a second. But I wanted to kind of look at crude from that perspective. Now, here's another thing, right? Here's another thing that I wanted to talk about as we get into this discussion. Before I jump down into the contango tango and the backwardation components of futures markets, I want to look at one other futures contract here. And so somebody else was asking me the question, can we track other commodities? Can we track other currencies? Click right here on this little dropdown and go to the futures tab right there.
And you can see the futures contracts that are available here. And you can also see their tick size, their tick value, and their initial margin requirement. So we've got things like 6A, which is Australian, the Aussie dollar. We've got the Japanese yen futures. You've got some other currency futures in here. The Mexican peso, for instance. You don't have all of them. And there aren't futures contracts available on all of them. But what is here is what is available to track, not necessarily trade. You can see some of the micro contracts or some of the larger contracts here. And we can kind of scroll down. We can scroll through these lists. So here's our micro crude. There's our micro Canadian dollar, our micro ES, micro gold, those smaller one-tenth contracts. I wish.
So unfortunately, in the futures contracts, even though it's displayed here in this list, the one that we can't see, or one of the ones that we can't see and can't access is frozen concentrated orange juice, futures. And it's not that you can't find it. It's just, it's on a different exchange. And you think about the weather that's been going on in Florida. We had two hurricanes that impacted the orange juice crop. And we had, we now have snow in Disney World yesterday. Pretty, probably a pretty significant impact on some agricultural crops, including frozen concentrated orange juice. And it's not that you can't find it. It's just, it's on a different minty union of crops automatically, and, and it's all over the place.
So well, you can adjust immediately, doisYes, but Um, in 30, 30 years, we've gotten very close yeah. Let's take a look at one that might be interesting given the weather. Recently, and I'm gonna scroll down here on this list, I'm gonna scroll down here to, uh, forward slash X C which is the micro corn futures. Right? So this is gonna be the same. This is the same. Trend. Same chart as forwardslash поверх TA X and Z C, which is the large corn future contract. But you notice the notional value. This is forty-eight 81 . гор Nevertheless, we went to forward slash ZC, which is the corn contract, you can see that the contract size is 24, 425, but we're going to do forward slash XC, the corn contract.
And you can see the move that corn has been making to the upside. In fact, a lot of bull flag types of moves here recently. So some strong bullish movement in corn at the moment and a big move to the upside. Okay. So fitness and dance, what does that column of initial margin mean right here? That is the cost to initiate a trade into one contract of that particular futures instrument. That's the initial margin required. Then that maintenance margin will change. So we've got a couple of things here. We've got a couple of things here. We've got a couple of things here. We've got a couple of resources. I'm going to show you those resources here in a second that talk about futures margin, but I want to jump back into this particular discussion.
So here's the thing. Now we have futures, the futures contract on the corn contract, right? So we see this little bit of a rally up and a little bit of a pull back into the support level, a little bit of that kind of bull flag perspective here again, with some bullishness in the RSI, very strong bullishness in the RSI. So some strong upward movement in the corn contract. So here's what I want to do. If we were to compare side by side, these two contracts, crude oil that we just looked at and corn, you would say that maybe there's some differences here in kind of the expectations. It certainly seems as if there's a strong bullish expectation for corn prices to continue to rise, whether it's weather, whether it's demand, whatever, right?
Agriculture demand is going up. Those types of things. So here's what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here to this next tab over on the charts tab. So I'm in charts and then the sub tab product depth. Okay. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this forward slash XC, our crude, or excuse me, our corn contract. And you notice something that's going on here. So what this represents is the current price. So each one of these dots represents the current price for a contract expiration date. If I open up these curves right here, you can see the series. These are all the expiration dates for those futures contracts going out to those deliverable dates. These are sometimes referred to as deliverable dates, but they're the contract expiration dates, right?
So if I look at this curve, I can see that in the very near term, here's the current price for a contract expiration date. So if I look at this curve, current price, and this is, we're going to refer to that as kind of the spot price since we don't show spot prices, but you can see that the next deliverable is priced higher and the next one deliverable from that. So over the course of this curve from now to July, there's an expectation that prices will rise. The commodity prices will rise. That's what's called contango. Okay. C-O-N-T-A-N-G-O. Carol's got it in there. Tango. And contango describes a normal market, typically, especially in commodities, because there's an expectation that commodity prices are going to rise in the future because of demand, because of weather, whatever, right?
When you see prices, though, starting to move in a curve where the spot price is higher than the futures price, that's what is referred to as backwardation. And backwardation represents kind of a different situation, right? Backwardation represents an expectation that prices may fall in the long term because of potentially a constraint in supply, right now. Buyers are willing to pay a premium for the commodity now for short-term delivery, and the prices are expected to fall over a longer period of time, out to that October 20th. So that's kind of a different situation. And backwardation represents kind of a different situation. So sometimes commodity prices can get themselves into this contango, or excuse me, into this backwardation; but oil sometimes gets into this backwardation.
If we change this over to forward slash C-L, that big contract, you can see the backwardation, right? So here's the spot price. You can see how steep this backwardation is at the moment. And this oftentimes, especially in crude oil, can be an indication of a bearish expectation, right? Supply is constrained right now, somewhat, but an expectation that there's going to be more available supply, that there's going to be less demand, and futures prices are going to trend lower. And you can see how steep this is. And granted, this is a long curve. So we can change this curve a little bit. I can go all 32, 132 series. That takes us out to February 3rd, 2036. A lot can happen between now and 2036. We know that.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this a little bit more reasonable length curve. I'm going to go out to the August, September, October deliveries. We'll go out to October as kind of the far end of the curve here. And we'll just show that October, this is the February to October delivery curve for crude. And you can see how steep this curve is. And you can see how steep this curve is. And you can see how steep that backwardation is, right? So there's growing expectation that there's going to be more available supply and that prices are going to go down. That pushes that price expectation out of those futures contracts out to the, you know, back down into that 71 range. And it may go lower.
This isn't a hard and fast stop, right? These individual prices can go lower. But that generally indicates that there's a bearish expectation. So we go back to the chart for, say, for instance, forward slash CL. We can see that maybe that's weighing on this crude price moving a little bit higher here, maybe moving beyond this resistance level, right? So this is based, AC, great question, right? This is based off of historical moves, yes, number one. Number two, it also takes into account geopolitics because it's based on market prices. It's based on what market participants are willing to price those contracts. So let's go back into the product depth for just a second, okay? Yeah, there is some seasonality to this as well. But think about this.
If I'm a market participant, let's say I'm a refinery. I'm an independent refinery. I'm not an integrated like ExxonMobil. I'm, say, for instance, a Tesoro or somebody like that or a Holly Frontier that refines. But I buy product. I buy crude on the market. And I know that I've got deliverable contracts. I know that I've got deliverable contracts. I know that I've got deliverable contracts for my refined products. So I'm going to say, fine, you know what? I'm going to make sure that I buy a deliverable contract here. And I buy a deliverable contract here so that I've got continuous supply coming into the refinery. I don't want to shut the refinery down. So I'm buying perhaps more of these contracts out into the future at a lower price because I'm walking in.
That's kind of one of the reasons why futures contracts exist. As a refiner, in this case, as a participant, I'm buying more of these contracts out into the future. And I'm buying more in the market. I would be locking in that deliverable price at that current price at a lower price, right? So these are the input costs. So something to think about is that there's an expectation that crude prices are going to go to the downside, right? And this is simply market forces. But it keeps in mind and bears in mind kind of those geopolitical effects. But here's the thing. Remember, normally, commodity prices, they are contangoed. Okay, think about this. Think about this. Let me draw this in here real quick. Contango. Think about contango as climbing a hill.
So that's contango. Think about backwardation as sliding into a valley, okay? Contango is an upward curve. Backwardation is a downward curve from the spot price, right? So JW, that's kind of what we're getting to here. In the short term, we're going to be buying more of these contracts out into the future. Short term, we may put more weight on that fib bounce from a purely technical standpoint. But going out long term, I'm not looking for that trend to continue higher above that resistance level because of this strong backwardation in the crude market at the moment. Crude is one that, you know, that can see some pretty volatile moves one way or the other based on this backwardation.
If we see geopolitical risks increase, you can see this flip in the contango, which is going to go fairly quickly from that standpoint and change the perspective on the longer-term trend. So let's go down now to that chart again, and let's go to our shorter-term grid. So I'm going to go to my futures grid here. And we're going to go right here, the futures movers grid. Let's see. There we go. Okay. So here's what we have. Now we're on the micro contract. We have the one-year daily chart here on the left with a commodity channel index, that's a trend gauge. And we have the 15-minute chart. And the 15-minute chart here in this particular case is what we're going to look at for an entry signal into a short-term trade, right?
Okay. So take a look. We've got this kind of advanced block in the short term in these 15-minute candles. This is 15 minutes after the market opens. This is 30 minutes. We're above that 30-minute high after the market opened. So I'm going to look for this to be a green candle. I want to enter on the green candle in this particular case. And I'm going to look for this to move back up to this $80 mark, back up to the top of that bull flag, which is a pretty strong resistance. So what I'm going to do, because I know the characteristics of stop orders don't guarantee that I'm going to get out of the trade because of those protection points. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set an alert here.
Before I even do this, I'm going to set an alert that says if this mark's at or above, and I'm going to make it 80 even, then get out of the trade. That's going to be my alert here. And I'm going to go long the futures contract right here by simply saying 'right-click' and 'buy' that single contract. We're going to put it in our futures account. We know that we've got exchange fees that have to be paid. And we're going to click on 'send' and fire that order off. And we are long now that contract. And looking for this to move back up to this range right here, up in that $80 range. So let me go ahead and share this grid real quick.
Remember, anything that we share is simply for illustrative and educational purposes only. It is not a recommendation, nor is it guaranteed as to time or accuracy. But I'll put that in the description as well for those of you who are watching in the recorded version. Now, the other one that we wanted to look at was forward slash XC. And we're going to trade that corn contract looking at this moving to the upside. You see the big MACD pile up. You see the strong trend on the CCI. And we're going to go long this corn contract. But what I want to do really quickly first before we do that, I want to make this full size. I want to look and see where there might be some resistance levels previously to this contract.
So I'm going to go back and I'm going to look at this on a three-year weekly basis. And I'm going to say, look, I know I've got some resistance up here, maybe around that $500 range, maybe even stronger resistance up around the $552. So I'm going to put an alert here in this particular case at that $552. So we're going to right click, create alert. At or above $552. And that's going to let us know when that exit point might be reached in this short-term timeframe. So we're going to take this back to a one-year daily chart. We're going to put it back in our grid really quickly. And we're going to go long this contract. Right click, buy, single. And we're going to open this up.
And again, there's our transaction costs. And our margin cost. And we're going to go ahead and we're going to send that order off. And we're going to look at getting into that trade. Looking for that to fill. Now, I happen to notice, speaking of getting filled, happening to notice that we have a feedback survey there in the chat. Came late today, but that's okay. Help us out. Help us to make these webcasts better. Click on that survey link. You can click on it, open it up, and set it aside. Or you can come back and see what's going on. And we're going to go ahead and send that order off. And we're going to go back to it at a later time. Or you can click on it when we're done.
Just make sure you do that before we close out the webcast so that you don't miss it. But we've got this strong upward movement. If we go back to the monitor tab, it looks like we've probably got to work that a little bit here to get into the trade. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click, cancel, replace. And we're at a limit order. I'm going to open up that lock. And we're going to go to confirm and send. Again, remember, this is paper money. We've got to emphasize that this is not a recommendation, simply an illustrative and educational example. We open up that lock, open up that limit order. Again, make sure that we read through the order. We're aware of the transaction costs.
And we'll see if we can get into that trade here. All right, let's pop back over. There we go. Now we're in that micro corn contract. So let's go back to our monitor tab. Let's take a look at what we are in here. And we're going to go back to our monitor tab. And we're going to go back to our here. Oh, you know what we did? Okay, I get it. We were already short the crude contract. Did anybody catch that? Did somebody catch that? I didn't, because guess what I didn't do? And you know what? This is a good reminder for me personally to read the freaking order, right? Because you know what we did? Did anybody catch it? We closed the short position on MCL instead of opening a new long position.
And we're going to go back to our monitor tab. And we're going to position on the crude contract. So we're going to go back to the charts. We're going to take a look at MCL, whoops, forward slash MCL. That's the future's contract here. It happens, guys. It happens even to Michael Fairbourn. I mean, even as kind of meticulous as Michael Fairbourn is, it happens. So what we're going to do is, again, we kind of see this backing off a little bit. It's coming back towards that support. So I'm going to set this up as a buy stop. And again, remember, this is going to function a little bit differently, because again, there's going to be those protection points.
But we're going to look at this and see if we can get in when it moves above this 75. 95, that short-term move. So right-click, buy single. But we're going to edit this order. And we're going to say, look, I want to buy this if it moves above that 75. 95. So we're going to make that a buy stop. And again, remember, this is going to work with those protection points in terms of filling this order. It's not going to necessarily fill in a market order. It's going to be worked by the exchange to try to fill it. So there's no guarantee that this buy stop order that we are putting in is, in fact, going to be filled. That's one of the things that you need to pay attention to in trading futures contracts.
And that's why we talk about this and use this idea. So I'm going to go ahead and show you how to do that. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to click on confirm and send. And we're going to send this order off. Again, reading through it. To open, not to close. And there's our exchange cost. And we're going to go ahead and click on send and fire that order off. And we'll wait for that to fill. It's not going to fill right now because we're not there, right? Now, let's do this. Let's come back over here. I wanted to show you some additional resources. So we're going to pop right here. And if you wanted to learn more about things like flags, you can go ahead and click on that.
And we're going to go ahead and this is the Trader Talks webcast page. Click on subscribe, by the way, down there at the bottom of the page so you can subscribe to this page. YouTube. com forward slash at Trader Talks webcast. If you want to look at flags, there's the flag patterns. If you want to look at margin, you can click on margin and you can see that information. If you want to click on futures, you can get information there about futures as well. Lots of additional resources here. Again, guys, remember to click on the feedback survey that's there in the chat. And again, my thanks to Michael Fairbourn for helping out today. Guys, you've been great. We've a lot of stuff going on today, a lot of stuff going on in these futures markets. But thanks to our great production staff for getting us up and running. We'll see you again very soon. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.
