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Specifying Expiration

The Pound Sign delimiter also enables you to display a specific out-month contract in a chart window. A delimited pound sign macro enables you to display a particular futures expiration, or out-month. To display a specific out-month contract, enter the instrument using the following syntax:

<symbol_root>#[n]

where [n] is an optional positive integer that identifies expiration. The positive integer tells the program which out-month to retrieve. For example, a pound sign delimited by a 1 tells the program to retrieve the first out-month, a 2 the second, and so on. In the following table, the examples show how the pound sign macro works. To read the table, assume the current date is January 15, 1994.

Wildcard
Function
Symbol
#
lead-month, i.e., March, 1994.
SPH4
#1
first out month, i.e., June 1994
SPM4
#2
second out month, i.e., September, 1994
SPU4
#3
third out month, i.e., December, 1994
SPZ4
#4
fourth out month, i.e., March, 1995
SPH5