Closing and Rolling Futures Positions

Study Notes:

In TWS Mosaic investors can quickly and easily create orders to close out existing futures positions or roll them to another expiration date from the Portfolio tab or a Watchlist in the Monitor panel.

Creating a Closing Order

To create a closing order the investor can hover the cursor over the instrument and click on the mouse to bring up an information box. The investor can choose to use the information box to close out either 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, or a custom percentage of the position. Above the information box there are four order buttons: Buy, Sell, Close, and Roll. The color of the boxes indicate what type of order will be created, blue for buy and red for sell. The investor chooses to use the Close button, which will create an order in the Order Entry panel to close 100% of the position.

In the Order Entry panel, the investor can adjust the order type, price, and Time-in-Force and when ready, click on the “Submit” button in the bottom right-hand corner. The Order Confirmation window will appear and after reviewing the order description, amount, and balances the investor can click Transmit to send the order. Once sent the order will populate the Activity panel and the investor can monitor its status, make changes to the order type or price, or cancel the order if it hasn’t yet been filled.

Rolling a Futures Position

To create an order to roll an existing futures position the investor can hover the cursor over the instrument and click on the mouse to bring up the information box and the four buttons and click on “Roll”. As previously mentioned, the box will be either blue indicating that the investor will be buying back a short position and rolling it to another short position or red indicating the investor will be selling an existing long position and rolling it to another long position.

In this example the investor has a long futures position and wants to roll it to a later expiration date. Once the “Roll” button is clicked the Futures Roll Builder box will appear showing all the possible combinations for closing out the existing position and rolling it to another expiration. The investor selects the desired combination and clicks “OK”.

The combination will then populate the Order Entry Panel. The side of the order and the size is already populated to close out the existing position and the investor can adjust the order type, price if applicable, and Time-in-Force. When they are ready, they click “Submit” in the bottom right-hand corner of the Order Entry Panel and an Order Confirmation window appears. Once the investor reviews the information, they can click Transmit to submit the order.

The order will populate the Activity panel and the investor may modify the order type, Time-in-Force, and price or cancel the order if it hasn’t been filled.