I am interested in buying oil futures.Can anyone tell me the symbol for light crude which closed today around?

34-35 dollars a barrel.I am interested in buying oil futures.Can anyone tell me the symbol for light crude which closed today around?
go buy uso. or get a nymex futures account with interactive brokers.I am interested in buying oil futures.Can anyone tell me the symbol for light crude which closed today around?
CLH9 is the commodity code for March 09 West Texas Intermediate Futures on Nymex.





You must first have a brokerage account for which to trade these instruments.


Now for the Techie part, Oil futures are contracts where one contract is for 1000 barrels of oil. Therefore the minimum exposure you will have at current levels is $35,000. Futures are traded ';on margin'; which is usually 10% of the exposure so at the minimum you would have to pay out $3,500 to start with. Of course if oil falls then your margin will fall with it, you must always maintain a certain amount in the margin account and your broker will expect this to be covered by the end of the day. If you cannot cover this margin call, your position will be sold at a loss.





Oil is currently in a contango, which means that the futures price is higher than the spot price. The problem with this is that while you saw oil at $35 per barrel, the future was actually trading at $38. Every month there is a different contract and a December 09 contract is trading at $60. This means that if you buy a contract for march and the oil price doesn't change then you will lose money, even if the price of oil stays the same or even goes up by a couple of dollars.





As for the suggestions above to buy USO, this is an ETC fund, based on the closest futures contract available and rolled at the end of the month. This means that every month the contract rolls to the future 2 months ahead which as stated before, is in contango. People are getting hammered by this product because they are losing 5-12% every month depending on the contango. I cannot stress this enough, anyone who wants to buy oil, find a product that averages out its futures contract or is based on total return swaps!! (USL is an averaged fund and CRUD:LN is based on total return swaps)
USO
better buy USO.
dont do it!!!!!

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