Make sure you're clear on the basic ideas and terminology of futures.

Step 2 - Decide on a strategy

Futures can fit into your overall trading strategy in several ways.

Diversify

Futures can help you diversify your portfolio by providing access to products that are hard to find elsewhere. Plus, you can get direct exposure to underlying assets like oil or precious metals.

Speculating

Futures can allow you to speculate on price movements in either direction—up or down—on a range of different assets.

Hedge

Using equity index futures, you can potentially help hedge your stock portfolio against downside risk.

Step 3 - Identify potential opportunities

Futures Research Center

Check out trading insights for daily perspectives from futures trading pros. View futures price movements and trading activity in a heatmap with streaming real-time quotes.

Automated technical pattern recognition

This tool helps you spot developing price swings by automatically populating charts with relevant technical patterns. Learn more about each pattern with just a click.

Step 4 - Choose your contract and month

Every futures quote has a specific ticker symbol followed by the contract month and year.

Step 5 - Understand how money works in your account

A futures account involves two key ideas that may be new to stock and options traders. One is "initial margin," which is not the same as margin in stock trading. Secondly, equity in a futures account is "marked to market" daily.