The roll: the standing cost of staying

Two tracks built the roll machinery: the commodities track priced it violently, module 8 there timetabled it. Futures inherit everything - and this lesson places the roll where it belongs in this track's cost structure: the one line that stands.

The inheritance, sized per family

Work the example: a financial future's quarterly roll through thin contango costs a fraction of a percent per cycle - around one percent a year at the worked figures, the financing-minus-dividends carry collected in instalments. Physical families pay the commodities track's storage-shaped gaps, which can be an order of magnitude larger. Same machinery, family-sized bills - and the sign rule transfers too: backwardated curves pay the maintained long, in every family where they occur.

Why this is the line that stands

• The stack is per trade: entry and exit pay it once each - it does not accrue.
• Margin returns and variation flows both ways: neither accrues either - lesson 3's ledger.
• The roll accrues: every expiry, for as long as the exposure is maintained - the only futures cost that compounds with holding period, which makes it the futures analogue of the CFD's financing meter, at a usually-lower rate the curve sets.

The costing habit, completed

A maintained futures position's annual cost is: the roll's annualised figure at the current curve - the calculator below prices it live - plus the stack times the rolls' round turns, plus lesson 3's capital line. That total against the CFD's meter and ownership's zero is the three-wrapper comparison this platform has been assembling for two tracks - now complete, computable per position, and decided as always by holding period and curve shape. Module 8 adds the timing craft; module 6 charges every backtest; this lesson's job was the placement: the roll is the rent, and everything else was the doorway.