Rithmic Symbol Guide

The Rithmic symbol guide will be both practical for  

  • The Investor/RT subscriber relying on a Rithmic account (from a prop or brokerage firm) as a live data source and therefore using Rithmic symbols as the primary instruments in their charts and quotepages
  • The owner of an IQ feed live data subscription, who will be executing orders towards his Rithmic account. In this case, the Rithmic individual contract symbol is added as “Broker Symbol” inside the corresponding DTN instrument settings window 

The instrument setup guide summarizes the key Investor/RT instrument concepts that you need to know, such as the DTN downloading alias, I/RT instrument sessions, the importance of the intraday monitoring status, and the historical data retention settings.

Rithmic US Future symbols

For the CME / CBOT / NYMEX / COMEX exchanges, Rithmic Future symbols are made of a  Root symbol followed by 'MY’ (contract expiration month and year), with Y the last digit of the contract year and M the month code as per the usual alphabetical letter convention for futures: 

So ESU5 is the Rithmic ticker for E-Mini S&P 500 quarterly contract expiring in September 2025. Any front-month contract can also be quickly identified on our Rollover Calendar page.

Rithmic European Future symbols

For EUREX markets, the contract expiration month is identified with a 4-digit extension "MMYY" (contract expiration month and year), ie the symbol of the DAX contract (root symbol "FDAX") expiring in September 2025 is FDAX0925 (and not FDAXU5) 

Rithmic symbol tables

For an easy read, the following tables, gathering symbols per exchange and futures market category, include the following information:

  • The Rithmic symbol corresponding to the front-month contract (as per early July 2025)
  • The DTN symbol for the corresponding continuous future contract, used as "Downloading Alias" in the Rithmic instrument setup window
  • Investor/RT default Full and Day sessions (All in Eastern Time), which are further discussed in the Sessions 101 support page
  • The typical daily contract volume (ie the average of the past 50 days as per July 10, 2025) was also included so that you could easily spot futures with very low (or even zero !) volume (that should typically not be daytraded)
  • The instrument tick increment (ie the minimum bid-ask spread) and tick value

Warning: To clearly identify the root symbol in these tables, an extra space has been added before the "MY" extension. It should of course be removed when adding the current front- month symbol on your instance

Table 1A - CME Equity Indexes, NYMEX & COMEX markets and US Treasuries & financials futures (CBOT/CME). 

 

Table 1B - CME currencies (incl. crypto), Agricultural products (CME/CBOT) and EUREX markets.

Warning / Good practice: Whenever adding for the first time a new symbol to your Investor/RT instance (or during a rollover procedure), always make sure that the full and day sessions are correct before proceeding with a "full download" operation.

Miscellaneous remarks:

  • Always check with your broker (or prop firm) the list of futures markets (and data) that are being made available for your account.  Paying the market exchange fees for CME or Eurex futures doesn’t necessarily mean that your data provider granted you access to every individual market traded on the CME or Eurex.
  • In the rare case your prop firm or brokerage firm would offer a future market not listed above, any Rithmic future symbols not present in the I/RT default database can always be added through the Future Type Setup preference menu.
  • Please also note that an integrated symbol search tool is available in the native Rithmic R Trade Pro application.