Contract codes

NQZ6 looks like a password and is really three plain facts stuck together: what, which month, which year. Reading it takes two minutes to learn and prevents the most avoidable mistake in futures — trading the wrong contract.

Mak · 3 min read · Stage 1, article 11 of 13

Three parts

Diagram 1. Root, month, year. The month letters are an exchange convention older than electronic trading, and they are not going to change now.

The twelve letters

There is no logic to memorise. The letters that look wrong — H for March, K for May, Q for August — are wrong because the obvious letters were taken by other things a century ago.

Month	Code	Month	Code
January	`F`	July	`N`
February	`G`	August	`Q`
March	`H`	September	`U`
April	`J`	October	`V`
May	`K`	November	`X`
June	`M`	December	`Z`

You only need four of them

Index futures expire on a quarterly cycle: March, June, September, December. Those are the four in bold — H, M, U, Z — and for these contracts you will never see the other eight.

Other markets use other cycles. Crude oil has a contract every month; agricultural products follow the growing season, which is why their codes look arbitrary until somebody explains the harvest. If you only trade index futures, four letters is the whole vocabulary.

The same contract, written five ways

This is where it stops being trivia. Platforms disagree about the format, and you will meet several.

Written as	Means
`NQZ6`	The classic exchange form, one-digit year.
`NQZ26`	Same thing, two-digit year. Unambiguous.
`NQ 12-26`	Month and year as numbers — the form some platforms show in their instrument list.
`/NQZ26`	A leading slash marks it as a future. Cosmetic.
`NQ` alone, or with `#`	Not a contract. A continuous series stitched from many, for charting. See the next article.

The mistake this prevents

Search the instrument list and you get several contracts with almost identical names. They all have charts. They all accept orders. Only one of them has any volume in it.

Trade the wrong one and the symptoms are strange rather than obvious: the chart looks broadly right but the candles are sparse, the spread is several ticks wide instead of one, fills come back at prices that seem unfair, and the level everyone else is discussing is not quite where it is on your screen.

Nothing is broken. You are in the back month — a real contract, with almost nobody in it. The fix is to check the code before the session, not during it.

Which raises the obvious question: how do you know when to move? That is the next article, and it is one of the few genuinely futures-only problems in this stage.