Lumen Futures
Blog
Market notes, program updates, and the occasional look behind the curtain at how a futures funding firm actually runs.
- Getting Started
- Markets & Contracts
- Trading Strategies
- Technical Analysis Patterns
- Platforms & Tools
- Funded Trading
Funded TradingSeptember 28, 2026What Is a Trailing Drawdown on a Prop Firm Account?
A trailing drawdown is a loss line that follows your account upward and never comes back down, and the arithmetic of where it sits decides how much room you have on any given morning.
- Markets & ContractsSeptember 27, 2026
Futures Month Codes: What the Letter in a Contract Symbol Means
The letter in a futures symbol is the delivery month, F for January through Z for December, and this covers how the rest of the symbol is built around it and why the same contract can appear in more than one symbol format.
- Markets & ContractsSeptember 26, 2026
Contango vs Backwardation: What the Shape of the Futures Curve Means
Contango is a market where each later delivery month is priced above the one in front of it, backwardation is the reverse, and the CFTC glossary names the upward-sloping case after the cost of carrying the underlying.
- Platforms & ToolsSeptember 25, 2026
What Is a Footprint Chart in Futures Trading?
A footprint chart prints how much traded at every price inside a single bar, and Sierra Chart, Quantower and ATAS can each split that volume into trades filled at the bid and trades filled at the ask.
- Trading StrategiesSeptember 24, 2026
What Is a Moving Average Crossover Strategy, and Does It Work?
A moving average crossover takes a position when a short average of price passes a longer one, and in Park and Irwin's test of twelve US futures markets the returns trend-following systems earned over 1978 to 1984 had turned negative over 1985 to 2003.
- Getting StartedSeptember 23, 2026
Stop Loss vs Stop Limit in Futures: What Each One Does When It Triggers
A stop order becomes a market order at your trigger price and a stop limit becomes a limit order, but on CME Globex both cap the fill, and whatever does not fill rests at that cap.
- Technical Analysis PatternsSeptember 21, 2026
What Is VWAP in Futures Trading?
VWAP is the average traded price over a period, weighted by the volume that traded at each price — a line whose value depends heavily on where you told it to start, and a benchmark that was built to measure execution rather than to forecast anything.
- Funded TradingSeptember 20, 2026
What Is the Consistency Rule at a Futures Prop Firm?
A consistency rule caps the share of your profit that may come from your single best trading day, and the arithmetic behind it sets a floor on how many profitable days it takes to clear the limit.
- Markets & ContractsSeptember 19, 2026
Holding a Futures Contract to Expiration: Cash or Delivery?
Hold a futures contract into expiry and it either settles in cash or obliges you to make or take delivery. How first notice day, broker close-outs and April 2020's negative oil fit in.
- Markets & ContractsSeptember 18, 2026
Trading Futures During News Events: What Happens When the Number Prints
The big US economic releases are published at fixed, pre-announced times, and a Federal Reserve study found price jumps more frequent in S&P 500 and Treasury bond futures on announcement days than on quiet ones.
- Technical Analysis PatternsSeptember 17, 2026
What Is a Double Top or Double Bottom Pattern?
A double top is two price peaks that stall at roughly the same level; a double bottom is the same shape inverted. Here is how one study of US stocks defined them precisely enough to count, how many it found, and what its tests did and did not show.
- Platforms & ToolsSeptember 16, 2026
What Is the DOM in Futures Trading?
The DOM is the price ladder a futures trader works orders on, showing resting buy and sell quantity at each price — and it is neither complete nor a statement of anyone's intent.