CME Group lists 10-Barrel WTI futures on NYMEX on 30 August 2026, under the product code TCL, pending regulatory review. At 10 barrels it is the smallest crude oil futures contract CME has ever listed, one tenth the size of Micro WTI and one hundredth the size of the benchmark contract.
Two things about this listing are worth knowing before the coverage settles, and both cut against what the press release implies.
The tick is unpublished. One day before listing, CME has not posted the minimum price increment or the dollar value of a tick for TCL anywhere we can find. No contract-specification page, no fact card, no rulebook chapter. That is the number that decides whether this contract is tradeable, and it does not exist publicly yet.
Weekend trading does not start on Saturday. TCL is the first CME energy contract on the 24/7 schedule, and that is the real story here rather than the size. But production launch and weekend trading are two different dates. CME’s Globex operational document puts the production launch on Sunday 30 August and the start of continuous weekend trading at 4:02 p.m. Central Time on Friday 4 September. The first weekend session is Labor Day weekend, not this one.
If you read one thing, read the second point. Anyone writing “24/7 crude launches Saturday” from the June press release is a week early.
What is confirmed about 10-Barrel WTI futures, and what is not
Rather than bury this, here it is up front.
Confirmed by CME:
| Item | Confirmed value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Product code | TCL | Globex Notice, 17 August 2026 |
| Contract size | 10 barrels | Product page |
| Ratio to Micro WTI | 1/10 | June press release |
| Ratio to benchmark WTI | 1/100 | Product page |
| Listing exchange | NYMEX | Product page |
| Settlement | Financial, cash settled | Product page |
| Production launch | Sunday 30 August 2026 | Globex operational document |
| Weekend trading begins | 4:02 p.m. CT, Friday 4 September 2026 | Globex operational document |
| Weekday maintenance | 4:00 to 4:02 p.m. CT | Globex operational document |
| Saturday maintenance | 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. CT | Globex operational document |
| Weekend trade date | Assigned to the following business day | Product page and client-systems docs |
| Security group | CS | Globex Notice |
| Spread type | SP, Standard Calendar | Globex Notice |
| Market data | MDP 3.0 channel 325, market segment 74 | Globex operational document |
| Clearing route at launch | Globex only, no ClearPort | 24/7 hub page |
| Regulatory status | Pending regulatory review | Product page footnote |
Not published as of 29 August 2026: the tick increment and tick value, the initial and maintenance margin, the listed contract months and listing cycle, the last trading day, price limits, block and BTIC eligibility beyond the spread designation, whether TCL volume counts toward CME volume-based fee discounts, and retail platform support on NinjaTrader, Rithmic, Tradovate, TradingView or Interactive Brokers.
That is a long list of unknowns for a contract listing tomorrow. We would rather show you the gap than fill it with estimates.
The TCL tick value, and why nobody can quote it yet
The tick is the whole cost story on a contract this small, so it is worth understanding why its absence matters.
Across the WTI complex, the per-barrel increment has been held constant and the tick value scales with contract size:
- Benchmark WTI (CL), 1,000 barrels, ticks at $0.01 per barrel, so one tick is $10.00.
- Micro WTI (MCL), 100 barrels, ticks at $0.01 per barrel, so one tick is $1.00.
- E-mini WTI (QM), 500 barrels, is the exception at $0.025 per barrel, so one tick is $12.50.
If TCL follows CL and MCL and keeps the one-cent-per-barrel increment, one tick on a 10-barrel contract would be worth ten cents. That ten-cent figure is our own arithmetic from the published pattern, not a CME number. It is the only assumption in this article, everything downstream of it is flagged, and CME could set a wider increment for a contract this small.
Two data points support the inference without confirming it. The Globex Notice lists TCL’s calendar spread as type SP, Standard Calendar, which is not one of the reduced-tick spread types CME uses where a different increment applies. And the whole rest of the complex, except QM, is at one cent. Neither is proof. Check CME’s contract-spec page before you trade, and certainly before you hard-code anything.
10-Barrel WTI vs Micro WTI vs the rest of the ladder
Everything below except the TCL tick is published by CME.
| TCL | MCL Micro WTI | QM E-mini WTI | CL benchmark WTI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contract size | 10 barrels | 100 barrels | 500 barrels | 1,000 barrels |
| Ratio to benchmark | 1/100 | 1/10 | 1/2 | 1 |
| Minimum tick | Unpublished* | $0.01 per barrel | $0.025 per barrel | $0.01 per barrel |
| Tick value | Unpublished* | $1.00 | $12.50 | $10.00 |
| Settlement | Cash | Cash | Cash | Physical, Cushing OK |
| Exchange | NYMEX | NYMEX | NYMEX | NYMEX |
| Trades weekends | Yes | No | No | No |
* Assumed ten cents if the one-cent-per-barrel increment holds. See the section above.
For scale on margin, CME’s product cards dated 7 July 2026 show Micro WTI at roughly $7,022 notional against $685 margin, E-mini WTI at roughly $35,110 against $3,423, and benchmark WTI at roughly $70,220 against $6,826. The TCL card reads “Coming soon” for both.
Two points matter more than the rest of the table. Benchmark CL is physically delivered at Cushing; the three smaller contracts are cash settled, so a retail trader is not facing delivery of barrels. And only TCL trades weekends. MCL, QM and CL all keep the traditional Sunday-to-Friday schedule with the daily hour-long break at 4:00 p.m. Central. If you want to trade crude on a Saturday, TCL is the only contract that lets you.
The 10-Barrel WTI size framing that will confuse half the coverage
CME has described this contract two ways and both are correct.
The 11 June 2026 press release called it one tenth the size of Micro WTI. The live product page calls it one hundredth the size of the benchmark. Ten barrels is one tenth of Micro WTI’s hundred and one hundredth of the benchmark’s thousand. The June wording measures against the Micro, the product page measures against the benchmark.
The trap is for a reader who anchors on the June “one tenth” line and then compares TCL against standard CL. That is off by a factor of ten. If you see coverage treating TCL as one tenth of the benchmark contract, it copied the press release and compared against the wrong reference.
The 24/7 mechanics for TCL: dates, windows and the weekend trade date
CME has been moving products onto 24/7 through 2026, family by family: cryptocurrency futures and options on 29 May, 1-Ounce Gold on 24 July, TCL from this listing, and 100-Ounce Silver scheduled for 11 September. The rules are not identical across families, so the energy implementation is worth reading on its own terms.
The two dates. Production launch is Sunday 30 August. Continuous weekend trading begins at 4:02 p.m. Central on Friday 4 September. Between those dates TCL trades, but on the conventional week.
The windows. For participants trading seven days a week, TCL has a two-minute maintenance window from 4:00 to 4:02 p.m. Central on weekdays, and a two-hour window on Saturday from 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. Central. Participants who stay on the five-day schedule keep the existing Globex hours, Sunday 5:00 p.m. to Friday 4:00 p.m. Central with the hour break each day.
The weekday window breaks down as close from 4:00:00 to 4:01:00, pre-open from 4:01:00 to 4:01:30, a no-cancel period from 4:01:30 to 4:02:00, then open at 4:02:00. The Saturday window is close from 2:00 to 3:45, pre-open from 3:45 to 4:00, open at 4:00.
Worth noting for anyone porting assumptions from the crypto rollout: the crypto launch schedule extended the daily maintenance to thirty minutes. The energy steady state is two minutes. CME’s own operational deck flags the reduction of the daily window to two minutes as a significant impact for both five-day and seven-day clients.
The weekend trade date. This is the rule most likely to break something quietly. TCL trades continuously regardless of the calendar day, but activity from Friday evening through Sunday evening, and on exchange holidays, is assigned a trade date of the following business day. Clearing, settlement and regulatory reporting all process on that following business day. A fill you take at 10 a.m. on a Sunday does not carry a Sunday trade date.
Weekend settlement. During weekend sessions, client systems receive preliminary settlements. Final clearing and settlement land on the next business day, consistent with the trade-date rule.
Routing and tooling. At launch TCL is Globex only. ClearPort submission is not supported. CME Direct does not support weekend trading. Market data flows on MDP 3.0 channel 325, market segment 74, and CME added a seven-day trading indicator to its Reference Data API so systems can identify which products run on the continuous schedule.
Three things that will break a bot on TCL
Each of these is documented by CME and each will produce a silent or confusing failure rather than a clean error.
Reconciliation that assumes trade date equals calendar date. Covered above and worth repeating because it is the one that will cost you an afternoon. Read the trade date off the fill record, not off the wall clock. Any weekend fill will disagree with a calendar-derived date, every weekend, forever.
The Saturday sequence reset. At the Saturday window, client systems face a disconnect and a sequence-number reset across iLink, Drop Copy and market data. CME advises clearing the order book and running your restart process. A reconnect handler written for a market that closes once a week, on Friday, will not be expecting this at 4 a.m. on a Saturday.
Good Till orders cancelled on Friday. By default, Good Till orders are eliminated every Friday at 4:00 p.m. Central for seven-day products, unless your clearing firm has enabled weekend credit settings. A resting order you expect to survive into the weekend may simply not be there. Confirm the setting with your FCM rather than assuming.
Beyond those three, the ordinary new-instrument work applies. Do not hard-code a tick value from an assumption, including ours. Re-derive position sizing from the confirmed tick rather than reusing tick counts from an MCL strategy, because the same tick count is a different dollar risk. Build roll logic that reads listed contracts from the exchange, since the TCL listing cycle is unpublished. And check that your data vendor carries channel 325 and that your symbol map points at exactly TCL. CME made TCL available in its New Release test environment from 30 June 2026, which is where to certify all of this before committing capital.
10-Barrel WTI margin and what it costs to trade
Margin is unpublished. CME’s product card reads “Coming soon.” Micro WTI margin was about $685 on the 7 July card, and TCL is one tenth of the Micro, but the exchange has not posted a figure and we will not invent one. Two things hold regardless: brokers set their own intraday and maintenance requirements on top of the exchange minimum, and the broker number is the one that liquidates you. Check CME’s margins page once TCL posts, then check your broker.
Commissions are the more interesting problem. No broker has published a TCL rate. NinjaTrader’s published schedule states it is current as of 14 August 2026 and updates quarterly, so it predates this listing. What is published is the plan structure: $0.39 per side on micro contracts on the free plan, $0.29 on the $99 monthly plan, and $0.09 on the lifetime licence, with exchange, clearing and NFA fees on top. NinjaTrader’s fee material cites a clearing fee of $0.19 per contract, and routing through Rithmic adds about $0.25 per contract.
If TCL is billed at the micro rate, and if the tick is ten cents, here is the shape of it. Both conditions are assumptions, so treat this as an illustration of the structure rather than a quote:
| Plan | Per side | Round turn | TCL ticks to cover | MCL ticks to cover |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0.39 | $0.78 | 7.8 | 0.78 |
| Monthly, $99 | $0.29 | $0.58 | 5.8 | 0.58 |
| Lifetime, $1,499 | $0.09 | $0.18 | 1.8 | 0.18 |
Read the last two columns together. The same $0.78 that costs less than one tick on a Micro costs nearly eight ticks on a 10-barrel contract. Add the clearing fee and any routing fee, both charged per contract and both indifferent to contract size, and the break-even widens further.
That is the structural point, and it does not depend on the assumptions. Exchange, clearing and NFA fees are charged per contract and do not scale down with contract size. They sit underneath whatever commission a broker sets, which puts a floor under the cost of trading anything. A 10-barrel contract hits that floor far sooner than a 100-barrel one. Whatever the tick turns out to be, TCL will cost more per unit of exposure than MCL, because the fixed costs are spread across a tenth of the barrels.
That does not make it useless. It makes it a precision instrument rather than a cheap one. Use it to size exposure finely, to learn the crude market with tiny dollar risk, or to hold a weekend position you could not hold in any other WTI contract. Do not use it as a cheaper way to express a view you would otherwise take in MCL, because it is not cheaper.
The single number to ask your broker for is the all-in round turn on TCL, commission and exchange fees together. Set that beside the tick once CME publishes it and the answer is immediate.
Which WTI contracts do not trade 24/7
CME has a habit of running parallel product families with similar codes and different rules, and it has caught traders out twice this year already in the equity index and crypto complexes.
In the WTI family the trap is simple: TCL is the only WTI contract on the continuous schedule. MCL, QM and CL are not. A trader who reads that “CME crude is going 24/7,” searches a platform for Micro WTI and assumes weekend access will be wrong.
There is no Spot-Quoted WTI product as of today, so the specific confusion that hit the Nasdaq and crypto families does not exist here yet. Two smaller hazards remain. Some data vendors use short base symbols for crude that will surface unrelated instruments in a fast symbol search. And CME lists other WTI financial products, including Daily WTI Financial futures and WTI Trade Month futures, which are neither TCL nor on the 24/7 schedule. Match the code letter for letter.
Why 24/7 crude matters: the weekend gap problem
Oil does not respect the trading calendar, and the events that move it hardest have a habit of landing on weekends.
OPEC+ frequently meets and announces on Sundays. Through 2026 the eight-member group led by Saudi Arabia and Russia announced a run of roughly 188,000 barrel per day monthly increases on consecutive Sundays, with the September target set on Sunday 2 August before the group signalled a pause.
Geopolitics runs on no schedule at all. Congressional Research Service report R45281 records that during 2025 roughly 20 million barrels per day moved through the Strait of Hormuz, about a quarter of global oil and about a third of global crude oil trade. The EIA’s August 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook shows what the disruption did to that: flows through the Strait averaged 4.9 million barrels per day in the second quarter of 2026, against 21.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 before the conflict began.
When that news broke on a Saturday, a WTI trader could do nothing until the Sunday evening reopen. The contract would reopen at a price that could sit several percent away from Friday’s close. After one 2026 escalation, an analyst quoted by Gulf News expected the reopening gap to be at least three percent on both benchmarks. A gap is not an abstraction: it is the price your stop actually fills at, which can be far worse than where you placed it.
Continuous trading changes the shape of that risk without removing it. Price discovers through the weekend, so instead of one large gap on Sunday evening you get a live market on Saturday and Sunday. Better, because you can act on Saturday news on Saturday. Worse, because a thin weekend book can move a long way on a modest order, and you can be stopped out at 3 a.m. on a Sunday while asleep. The gap risk becomes a liquidity risk.
What day-one TCL liquidity is likely to look like
TCL has no price history and no book. Early spreads will be wider and depth thinner than the established Micro, and that is true of every new listing rather than a criticism of this one.
The best available read comes from the products already running continuously. CME reported that nearly 15,000 1-Ounce Gold contracts traded over its inaugural 24/7 weekend, roughly $60 million in notional, with buyers and sellers typically within a dollar of each other through the weekend. By 11 August, CME reported more than 53,000 contracts traded in the expanded weekend sessions since the 24 July start, around $219 million in notional.
Two caveats on reading that across. Gold is not crude, and the crude weekend book starts from zero. And in crypto, which went continuous first, reporting noted that the deepest liquidity stayed on offshore venues even after the CME move, so continuous hours did not automatically relocate depth into the weekend.
For a longer view of how a right-sized crude contract can build, Micro WTI is the closest analogue. CME’s 11 June 2026 release put Micro WTI average daily volume at 272,000 contracts in May, up 317% against May 2025. That is encouraging, and it took years. Size early orders for a thin book, use limit orders rather than market orders through the first weekends, and do not assume you can exit size quickly at 3 a.m. on a Sunday.
Prop firms, funded accounts and weekend crude
We looked for published contract-equivalency rules or 24/7 policies from the major futures prop firms. As of today we found none. No firm appears to have published a TCL rule, an equivalency table entry, or a policy on weekend trading for the new energy contract.
The reason this matters is structural. Most evaluation and funded programs require positions flat by a daily cutoff, and many prohibit holding over a weekend at all. Firms also differ sharply on how drawdown is measured, between intraday trailing models that ratchet with unrealised profit and end-of-day models that only move on the close. Every one of those rules was written for a market that closes daily and shuts all weekend.
A contract that trades continuously does not fit cleanly, and the open questions have no published answers. Does the daily loss limit reset at the same boundary on a Saturday, while TCL is still trading? Does a trailing high-water mark update on weekend prints? Is a Sunday position an overnight hold, a weekend hold, or neither?
Until your firm publishes rules for seven-day products, assume the conservative reading: that weekend positions are not permitted and that your limits continue to apply against weekend price action. Ask the firm directly and get the answer in writing. The firms that answer clearly are telling you something useful about how carefully they have thought this through.
Does 10-Barrel WTI change your infrastructure needs?
Our honest read, as a company that hosts NinjaTrader and other futures platforms for automated traders.
If you are placing a few TCL contracts by hand during ordinary hours, no. A 10-barrel contract does not require special infrastructure, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. We would rather say that plainly.
The narrower argument is about the schedule rather than the size. A market that trades continuously through weekends and holidays cannot be supervised from a laptop on a home connection that you turn off to sleep. If you hold TCL over a weekend, or you run automation that has to survive Saturday and Sunday sessions, the thing that fails is rarely the strategy. It is the power, the home connection, or the machine sleeping at 3 a.m. during the thinnest book of the week. That risk compounds during a launch period, when an automated system is reconnecting through an unfamiliar Saturday reset, on a new instrument, in a market with no established depth.
If that describes you, our NinjaTrader VPS page covers the setup and our Chicago location is the relevant one for NYMEX products. Measure your own path first rather than taking anyone’s number, ours included: the latency checker gives a zero-install read and our benchmarks page shows the method so you can reproduce it. If you are comparing providers rather than platforms, our futures VPS comparison ranks the field and discloses that we are one of the entries in it.
If you trade manually during the day, you do not need any of it for this contract.
How we checked this
Contract facts on this page come from CME Group’s own materials, read in full: the TCL product page, the WTI futures ladder page and its product cards dated 7 July 2026, the 24/7 crypto, energy and metals hub page, the 11 June 2026 press release, the Micro WTI fact card for the CL, MCL and QM tick values, the CME Globex operational document covering the 1-Ounce Gold and 10-Barrel Crude expansion to 24/7, the CME Globex Notice of 17 August 2026, and CME’s client-systems documentation on seven-day trading. Commission components come from NinjaTrader’s published pricing and commission pages. The Strait of Hormuz figures come from Congressional Research Service report R45281 and the EIA’s August 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook. Weekend gold volumes come from CME’s press releases of 27 July and 11 August 2026.
One figure on this page is ours rather than CME’s: the assumed ten cents per tick, inferred from the one-cent-per-barrel increment used across the rest of the WTI complex. Every cost calculation built on it inherits that assumption, and we have marked where.
Where CME’s own documents disagreed, we used the operational document over the press release. The gold 24/7 start is the example: the June press release says 26 July, the Globex operational document and the Product Modification Summary say weekend trading began on 24 July. Operational documents describe what the system actually does.
Where something is unpublished, we say so rather than estimating. The tick, the margin, the listing cycle, the last trading day, price limits and platform support are all in that category today. We will update this page as each is published rather than guessing now.
We have not traded this contract, because it has not listed yet. What we bring beyond the reading is the adjacent part: we host NinjaTrader and other futures platforms for automated traders, and we spend a lot of time watching what breaks when a contract or a schedule changes underneath a running strategy. That is where the automation section comes from.
Frequently asked questions
TCL. It is a NYMEX-listed, cash-settled crude oil futures contract of 10 barrels, listing on 30 August 2026 pending regulatory review.
CME has not published it. If TCL keeps the one-cent-per-barrel increment used by benchmark WTI and Micro WTI, one tick would be worth ten cents, but that is an inference from the published pattern rather than a CME figure. Check CME’s contract-spec page before trading or before hard-coding it.
Ten barrels, which is one tenth the size of Micro WTI (100 barrels) and one hundredth the size of the benchmark WTI contract (1,000 barrels). It is the smallest crude oil futures contract CME has listed.
The contract lists on 30 August 2026, but continuous weekend trading begins at 4:02 p.m. Central Time on Friday 4 September 2026. The first weekend session falls on the Labor Day weekend, not on launch weekend.
Yes, from 4 September. TCL is the first CME energy contract on the seven-day schedule, with a two-minute maintenance window at 4:00 p.m. Central on weekdays and a two-hour window on Saturday from 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. Central.
No. Micro WTI (MCL) is 100 barrels and trades Sunday to Friday. TCL is 10 barrels, one tenth of MCL, and is the only WTI contract that trades weekends. Both are cash settled on NYMEX.
The 10-Barrel WTI contract (TCL), at 10 barrels, from its listing on 30 August 2026.
Activity from Friday evening through Sunday evening, and on exchange holidays, is assigned a trade date of the following business day. Clearing, settlement and regulatory reporting all process on that following business day, so a Sunday fill does not carry a Sunday trade date.
Unpublished. CME’s product card reads “Coming soon.” For scale, Micro WTI margin was about $685 on CME’s 7 July 2026 card. Your broker will also set its own intraday and maintenance requirements on top of the exchange minimum.
No broker has published a TCL rate. Because exchange, clearing and NFA fees are charged per contract and do not scale with contract size, a 10-barrel contract will cost more per unit of exposure than a Micro whatever the tick turns out to be. Ask your broker for the all-in round turn on TCL and compare it against the tick once CME publishes one.
TCL if you want the smallest possible dollar risk per tick, or you want to trade crude over a weekend, which no other WTI contract allows. MCL if you want lower cost per unit of exposure, because the fixed per-contract fees spread across ten times the barrels.
The date is scheduled for 30 August 2026 and CME’s product page still carries a “pending regulatory review” footnote. We found no notice confirming final clearance, so treat it as scheduled rather than confirmed.
No major futures prop firm appears to have published rules for TCL or for seven-day products as of 29 August 2026. Most require positions flat by a daily cutoff and prohibit weekend holding, so assume weekend positions are not permitted until your firm confirms otherwise in writing.
TCL was available in CME’s New Release test environment from 30 June 2026, but we found no retail go-live confirmation from NinjaTrader, Rithmic, Tradovate, TradingView or Interactive Brokers. Check that your platform lists exactly TCL and that your feed carries MDP 3.0 channel 325.
Three things specifically: reconciliation that assumes trade date equals calendar date, reconnect logic that is not expecting the Saturday sequence-number reset across iLink, Drop Copy and market data, and Good Till orders being cancelled every Friday at 4:00 p.m. Central unless your clearing firm enables weekend credit settings.
Both are correct against different reference contracts. TCL is one tenth of Micro WTI and one hundredth of benchmark WTI. Coverage that copied the June press release wording and then compares TCL to the benchmark is off by a factor of ten.
Not for placing a few contracts by hand during the day. The narrower case is the schedule: if you hold TCL over a weekend or run automation that must survive weekend sessions, the failure point is usually power, home internet or a sleeping machine rather than the strategy.
Contract facts on this page come from CME Group’s product pages, product cards, press releases, Globex notices, the 24/7 operational documents for 1-Ounce Gold and 10-Barrel Crude, and CME client-systems documentation, together with NinjaTrader’s published pricing pages, Congressional Research Service report R45281, the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook, and named reporting on weekend crude and OPEC+ decisions. The TCL tick, margin, listing cycle, last trading day, price limits and platform support were unpublished as of 29 August 2026 and are described as such; the ten-cents-per-tick figure and the cost calculations built on it are our own arithmetic. This is infrastructure and educational content, not trading or financial advice.
