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Rolling futures expiry w/ Continuous Futures

1) If I purchased a {X} month (or offset) continuous futures and didn't touch it at all, does Quantopian automatically roll the position over?

For example, suppose I bought a continuous_future("CL", offset=0, roll="calendar", adjustment="mul"), does it:

  • Sell the contract automatically on auto_close_date
  • Buy the next month
  • While keeping the notional exposure the same?

2) Is there any way to instantiate a the continuous futures contract that's rolled some {X} number of days prior to the auto_close_date?

3) Is the end_date of a futures contract the same thing as the expiry date (or the day before)?

Thanks in advance!

2 responses

I am also searching (urgently) for the above information. Can somebody help ? Also, is is possible to ... do .. say "i want to order this future, but i need to check if the expiry day is within X days, then please order the next month future instead." is this possible ?

There's no automatic rolling with continuous futures, just automatic closing. However, I put together an example that rolls contracts 2 days before the auto_close_date. You should be able to change the EARLY_CLOSE_DAYS variable in the example to whatever number of days you prefer, as described in your example above.

The end_date is the last day for which we have pricing data for a contract, while the expiry_date is sent to us as part of the meta data for the contract. The relative difference between the end_date and the expiry_date will likely vary between futures.

Let me know if this helps.

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