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Market Basics

What Is a Contract Specification

A contract specification is the page your broker publishes for every symbol, saying what one lot of it is, how finely its price is quoted, what it costs to hold, when it trades and what the platform will refuse. This paper shows you the page, what its rows mean on three different symbols, what the digits row does to every number you type, what the stops level refuses, and where to open the page on your own platform.

Difficulty
Intermediate
Reading time
6 min
Pages
8
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

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The page nobody reads

Every symbol on your platform has a page behind it. The contract specification is the sheet your broker publishes for each one. It says what one lot of it is, how finely its price is quoted, what the spread and the swap are, when it trades, and what the platform will refuse to accept. It is two clicks from any chart, and almost nobody opens it until a number on the ticket surprises them. Every row on it is money, time or size.

What one lot is, on each sheet

The first row to read is the contract size, because the word lot means something different on every sheet. On the euro against the dollar a lot is a hundred thousand euros, and a pip — the fourth decimal place of the price — is worth ten dollars per lot. On gold a lot is a hundred ounces, and a step of ten cents in the price is worth ten dollars. On the Nasdaq a lot is one index contract, and a move of one point in the index — from 29,127 to 29,128 — is worth one dollar. The same word on the ticket buys a completely different thing on each, and this row is where the difference is written down.

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