Oil trading

What does the oil price depend on?

You can trade crude oil with InstaTrade in the form of CFDs on futures. This means that a lot will not have a fixed volume in barrels, gallons, or liters of the crude. Instead, there will be a fixed margin available in the specification. Beside the price for futures, the specification has three parameters that are important for every trader: the margin, the value and the tick size. Let us have a look at an example.

Let us say you decided to buy #CL (a CFD on crude oil). You can see that the margin is 2,000, i.e. you will commit 2,000 for each open lot. In other words, if your balance is USD 3,000, after a lot is opened, you will only have USD 1,000 of free margin.

Now, let us imagine you bought at USD 61.60 and closed the trade at 61.80. You can see in the specification that the tick size (that is, the minimum price change) is 0.01. This means that the price change from 61.60 to 61.80 constitutes 20 ticks. The tick price is USD 10. In other words, you earned 20*10-30= USD 170.

You may wonder why 170, not 200. And what is this difference of USD 30? Please note that the buy and sell price is the same. Here, the broker earns not from the spread but from the fee that is also shown in the specification. And the fee amounts to USD 30.

Essentially, this is all the information you need to start trading. This and, of course, the oil price chart and the list of indices available, please see below.