Setting Up Finviz Futures For Commodity And Index Tracking

Finviz is a powerful, free platform for stock screening and market analysis. While many users focus on equities, Finviz also offers valuable tools for tracking futures contracts, particularly for commodities and major market indexes. Setting up Finviz to monitor these futures can provide a crucial edge in understanding market sentiment and potential price movements across various sectors. This guide will walk you through the steps to effectively utilize Finviz for futures tracking, enabling you to incorporate this data into your trading or investment strategy.

Understanding the interplay between futures and their underlying assets is essential for any serious market participant. Futures contracts, representing an agreement to buy or sell an asset at a predetermined price and date, often act as leading indicators. By monitoring futures, you can gain insight into the expectations of professional traders and institutions, potentially anticipating shifts in commodity prices, equity index performance, and overall market direction.

This article will provide a clear, step-by-step guide on how to configure Finviz to track the futures contracts that matter most to you, allowing you to make more informed decisions.

1. Navigating to the Finviz Futures Page

The first step is to locate the futures section on Finviz. It's not immediately obvious, but easily accessible once you know where to look.

  • Go to the Finviz Website: Open your web browser and navigate to https://finviz.com/.
  • Find the "Futures" Tab: Look for the "Futures" tab in the top navigation bar. It's usually located towards the right side of the screen. Click on it.

This will take you to the main Finviz futures page, which displays a heatmap of various futures contracts.

2. Understanding the Finviz Futures Heatmap

The futures page presents a heatmap, with each square representing a different futures contract. The color of the square indicates the performance of that contract for the day: green for gains, red for losses. The intensity of the color reflects the magnitude of the change.

  • Contract Symbols: Each square displays the ticker symbol of the futures contract. For example, ES represents the E-mini S&P 500 futures.
  • Performance Percentage: The percentage shown within the square indicates the percentage change in the contract's price for the current trading day.
  • Hovering for Details: Hovering your mouse over a square will provide additional information, including the last price, open, high, low, and change.

This heatmap provides a quick overview of the day's performance across a range of futures contracts. However, to truly leverage Finviz for futures tracking, you'll need to delve deeper.

3. Customizing Your Futures View

Finviz allows you to customize the futures heatmap to focus on the contracts that are most relevant to your trading or investment strategy.

  • Selecting Specific Futures: The default view shows a wide range of futures. You can narrow this down by using the dropdown menu at the top of the page. This menu lets you select specific categories, such as "Energy," "Metals," "Grains," or "Financials."
  • Focusing on Key Indexes: If you're interested in tracking major market indexes, select "Financials." This will display futures contracts for indexes like the E-mini S&P 500 (ES), Nasdaq 100 (NQ), Dow Jones (YM), and Russell 2000 (RTY).
  • Commodity Tracking: For commodity traders, the "Energy," "Metals," and "Grains" categories are essential. These allow you to monitor futures contracts for crude oil (CL), natural gas (NG), gold (GC), silver (SI), corn (ZC), wheat (ZW), and soybeans (ZS).

By customizing your view, you can filter out irrelevant information and concentrate on the futures contracts that directly impact your investment decisions.

4. Analyzing Individual Futures Contracts

Clicking on a specific futures contract square on the heatmap will take you to a dedicated page for that contract. This page provides a wealth of information, including:

  • Price Chart: A candlestick chart displaying the contract's price history. You can adjust the time frame of the chart to view daily, weekly, or monthly data.
  • Technical Indicators: A range of technical indicators, such as moving averages, RSI, MACD, and Stochastics, are displayed below the chart. These indicators can help you identify potential trading opportunities.
  • News Feed: A news feed related to the underlying asset or market sector. This can provide valuable insights into factors that may be influencing the contract's price.
  • Key Statistics: Key statistics, such as open interest and volume, are displayed on the right-hand side of the page. Open interest represents the total number of outstanding contracts, while volume indicates the number of contracts traded during the current session.

By analyzing this information, you can gain a deeper understanding of the contract's price action, technical outlook, and fundamental drivers.

5. Utilizing Finviz for Correlation Analysis

One of the most powerful ways to use Finviz for futures tracking is to analyze the correlation between different futures contracts and their underlying assets.

  • Index Futures and Equity Markets: Monitor the E-mini S&P 500 (ES), Nasdaq 100 (NQ), and Dow Jones (YM) futures to gauge the overall sentiment of the U.S. stock market. A strong positive correlation between these futures and the corresponding equity indexes suggests a bullish outlook.
  • Commodity Futures and Related Stocks: Track commodity futures, such as crude oil (CL) and natural gas (NG), in conjunction with the stocks of companies in the energy sector. For example, a rising crude oil price may positively impact the stock prices of oil producers.
  • Intermarket Analysis: Analyze the relationship between different asset classes. For instance, a rising gold price (GC) may indicate increased risk aversion in the market, potentially leading to a decline in equity prices.

By identifying these correlations, you can develop a more comprehensive understanding of market dynamics and make more informed trading decisions.

6. Setting Up Alerts (Indirectly)

Finviz doesn't directly offer price alerts for futures contracts. However, you can indirectly achieve a similar effect by monitoring the futures data closely and setting up alerts for related stocks or ETFs.

  • Monitor Key Levels: Identify key support and resistance levels on the futures charts.
  • Set Alerts for Related Assets: Use your brokerage platform or a dedicated alert service to set up price alerts for stocks or ETFs that are closely correlated with the futures contracts you are tracking. For example, if you are monitoring crude oil futures, you could set up alerts for oil ETFs like USO or oil company stocks like ExxonMobil (XOM).
  • Correlation-Based Alerts: When the price of the related asset triggers your alert, check the corresponding futures contract on Finviz to confirm the trend and assess the potential impact on your overall portfolio.

This indirect approach allows you to leverage Finviz's futures data to generate timely trading signals.

7. Limitations of Finviz Futures Data

While Finviz is a valuable tool, it's important to be aware of its limitations when it comes to futures data.

  • Limited Contract Selection: Finviz does not offer data for all futures contracts. It primarily focuses on the most actively traded contracts.
  • Delayed Data: The futures data on Finviz may be slightly delayed, typically by 15-20 minutes. This is important to consider if you are a day trader or require real-time data.
  • No Historical Data Download: Finviz does not allow you to download historical futures data.

For more comprehensive and real-time futures data, you may need to consider a paid data provider. However, for many investors and traders, Finviz provides a sufficient and cost-effective solution for tracking futures contracts.

Conclusion: Integrating Finviz Futures into Your Strategy

By following these steps, you can effectively set up Finviz to track futures contracts for commodities and major market indexes. This allows you to gain valuable insights into market sentiment, identify potential trading opportunities, and make more informed investment decisions. Remember to customize your view to focus on the contracts that are most relevant to your strategy, analyze individual contracts to understand their price action and technical outlook, and utilize Finviz for correlation analysis to identify relationships between different asset classes. While Finviz has its limitations, it remains a powerful and free tool for tracking futures and enhancing your market analysis. Don't underestimate the power of this free tool to add another dimension to your market understanding. Start exploring the futures section today and see how it can improve your trading.