NYMEX · CL · MCL
CL futures: NYMEX WTI crude oil
NYMEX WTI crude oil futures are one of the most liquid commodity contracts in the world and the benchmark for U.S. oil. One contract is 1,000 barrels, so each one-cent tick is worth $10 and a one-dollar move is worth $1,000.
- CL tick value
- $10.00
- $0.01 per barrel
- CL per point
- $1,000
- $1.00 per barrel
- MCL tick value
- $1.00
- Micro WTI Crude Oil
- Round trip, in R
- 0.053 R
- At a 0.8-ATR stop, screening engine
CL contract specifications
| Specification | CL · Crude Oil (WTI) | MCL · Micro WTI Crude Oil |
|---|---|---|
| Contract unit | 1,000 barrels of West Texas Intermediate | 100 barrels of West Texas Intermediate |
| Exchange | NYMEX | NYMEX |
| Tick size | $0.01 per barrel | $0.01 per barrel |
| Tick value | $10.00 | $1.00 |
| Value of a point | $1,000 | $100 |
| Settlement | Physically delivered | Cash-settled |
- Trading hours
- Sunday to Friday, 6:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET on CME Globex, with a daily halt from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET.
- CL contract months
- Every calendar month, listed years ahead
- CL last trading day
- Three business days before the 25th calendar day of the month before delivery (four, if the 25th is not a business day).
Exchange rules as published, checked 22 September 2026. Holidays shorten the hours, and the exchange’s own calendar is the authority on any single date.
What a move in CL is worth
Both CL contracts, by points, ticks or entry and exit. For every contract at once, use the tick value calculator; to size a position, the position size calculator.
One point on CL is $1.00 per barrel. Use a minus sign for a loss.
Profit or loss, one contract: $10,000.00
Crude Oil (WTI) (CL), NYMEX: 1,000 barrels of West Texas Intermediate. Before commissions and slippage.
How CL trades
CL trades the same Globex week as the index contracts, but its day has its own landmarks. Liquidity builds through the U.S. morning. The EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report, normally at 10:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, is the scheduled event of the week, and the daily settlement price is set at 2:30 p.m. ET. Unscheduled supply news, from OPEC+ decisions to outages and sanctions, arrives at any hour.
Unlike the index contracts, CL lists every calendar month and is physically delivered at Cushing, Oklahoma. A contract stops trading around the 20th of the month before delivery, and anyone still holding it takes on a delivery obligation few speculators can meet. On 20 April 2020 the expiring May contract settled at −$37.63 a barrel for exactly that reason.
Twelve expiries a year means twelve joins in any continuous chart. The gap at each join is the shape of the futures curve, not a move anyone traded, and a backtest that does not know where the seams are will find them profitable.
CL or MCL?
Micro WTI Crude Oil (MCL) is 100 barrels: $1 a tick and $100 per one-dollar move, one tenth of CL. It is cash-settled rather than delivered, which removes the delivery obligation but not the roll: it still expires every month.
One CL contract can move several thousand dollars in a volatile session. For many accounts MCL is the only size at which a crude strategy's stop fits the risk budget at all.
What the research record says about CL
At the menu's 0.8-ATR stop on 30-minute bars, a CL round trip costs 0.053 R in the screening engine, against 0.012 R on NQ. Crude trends within the day, but not from one bar to the next, and daily-bar momentum reads zero autocorrelation on CL just as it does on the index contracts.
Two legs on the screening menu are built around crude's own calendar: whether today is an EIA petroleum report day, and where CL sits in its monthly roll cycle. Its paired gate is heating oil, a product refined from crude, so a signal can be required to agree with the market it feeds.
Screening an idea on CL
An idea on CL is written in the Strategy Language on its own bars, in the regular session or the whole Globex session: time bars from one minute to a week, or bars that are not time bars. Those are point-and-figure, kagi and line break, drawn from 1-minute closes at any size; their signals come from the bars and their fills from the underlying 1-minute prices.
It can read 62 indicators (moving averages; oscillators such as RSI, Stochastic, MACD and CCI; volatility measures and bands such as ATR, Bollinger and Keltner; volume studies with VWAP; trend studies such as ADX and Supertrend; and community lines in their non-repainting versions); session levels such as the opening range and the prior day's high and low, and the overnight range; and the clock and the calendar of scheduled releases; it enters at the market, on a stop or at a limit, and exits by its stop, its target, a trailing stop, a time limit or a condition.
Held overnight on day or week bars of the whole Globex session, a rule on CL is a swing screen, read on CL’s daily tape from February 2017 and graded candidate, promising, doubtful or dead rather than judged gate by gate. A position held overnight can open beyond its stop, so a loss can be larger than the stop you set.
The cost figures on this page are the menu's, at a 0.8-ATR stop on 30-minute bars: a screen written in the Strategy Language pays the same round trip for every contract it enters, and what that is in R depends on the stop you write, or on the ATR of its bars when you write none.
The menu, which the desk still offers beside the language, builds an idea on CL from the tape's own order-flow delta or close location in range, or one of 67 external legs in 8 families, with HO (heating oil) available as its paired gate.
- Market breadth 16
- Up / down volume 8
- Relative breadth 5
- Participation 2
- Volatility term structure 2
- Scheduled events 4
- Contract roll phase 3
- Technical indicators 27
Generated from the ledger, measured 28 October 2026. These describe specifications screened, not strategies traded.
From the research record
- SettledPicking the strategy with the best return-to-drawdown ratioReturn persists weakly out of sample and the drawdown ratio does not, so rank on return and correlation and let the portfolio shape the drawdown.
- Works with conditionsAdding a filter to a strategy that already worksA filter that keeps half the trades needs a 41% lift in average R to draw level, which is the bar to design against.
- SettledAveraging into a position on a price gridA constant position at matched risk beat every scale-in scheme tested, and the shuffled-bar placebo shows why.
- Works with conditionsTrading the opening-range breakout before 10:00 ETThe same signal carries information after 10:00 that it does not before, so the clock is the lever.
CL futures questions
- What is the tick value of crude oil futures?
- On CL the minimum tick is one cent per barrel, worth $10 per contract. On Micro WTI Crude Oil (MCL) the same cent is worth $1.
- How much is a $1 move in crude oil futures worth?
- $1,000 per CL contract and $100 per MCL contract.
- What are the crude oil futures trading hours?
- CL trades on CME Globex from 6:00 p.m. ET on Sunday to 5:00 p.m. ET on Friday, with a one-hour halt from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET every weekday. The daily settlement price is set at 2:30 p.m. ET.
- When do CL futures expire?
- Every month. A contract stops trading three business days before the 25th calendar day of the month before delivery (four, if the 25th is not a business day). CL is physically delivered, so speculative positions are rolled or closed before then.
- What time is the EIA crude oil inventory report?
- Normally 10:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday. In a week with a U.S. federal holiday it usually moves back a day.
- What is the difference between CL and MCL?
- MCL is one tenth of CL, 100 barrels against 1,000: $1 a tick against $10. MCL is cash-settled; CL is physically delivered.
Screen an idea on CL
Put a trading idea on CL through seven gates written down before the run, from real per-fill costs to a drift null, a walk-forward and an era split. The verdict comes back in seconds.