Crude oil futures traders
Crude Oil Trading Journal
CL trades nearly 24 hours a day, but its volatility isn't spread evenly across that window — weekly EIA and API inventory reports (Wednesday and Tuesday, respectively) routinely produce sharp, scheduled moves that dwarf normal session activity. A journal that doesn't distinguish "a trade during the inventory report" from "a trade at 2am with nothing scheduled" misses the single biggest source of variance in crude oil trading.
The contract math, in real dollars
CL moves $10 per tick (0.01) and $1,000 per full point. Micro WTI Crude Oil (MCL) is exactly a tenth of that — $1 per tick, $100 per point — same price action, different dollar consequence per contract. Fillbook logs every CL and MCL fill against its real point value, so P&L and R-multiple reflect the actual dollar risk taken, not a rounded guess.
Inventory reports are a real, recurring volatility event
EIA's weekly report (10:30am ET Wednesdays, delayed a day on holiday weeks) and the API's own report the evening before both routinely move CL sharply within minutes of release. Tagging trades by time of day makes it possible to see, after enough history, whether your results around these windows are actually better or worse than your baseline — rather than assuming either way.
Overnight session behavior differs from the day session
Crude's nearly round-the-clock Globex session means liquidity and typical range genuinely differ between the U.S. day session and the overnight hours — a strategy that works in one doesn't automatically transfer to the other. Fillbook's time-of-day breakdown surfaces that difference directly from your own logged trades instead of a general assumption.
Prop-firm accounts and CL
CL's real dollar-per-tick value means position sizing has immediate consequences for trailing drawdown and daily-loss limits inside an evaluation or funded account — more so than a lower-tick-value contract at the same contract count. See the prop-firm trading journal page for the account-rule side of this.
Frequently asked questions
$10 per tick (a 0.01 move) and $1,000 per full point. Micro WTI Crude Oil (MCL) is exactly a tenth of that: $1 per tick, $100 per point.
The EIA's weekly petroleum status report and the API's own inventory estimate both give traders new supply/demand data at scheduled times, and the market repricing to that new information is what produces the sharp, short-window moves — not random volatility.
Yes — P&L, R-multiple, and position sizing are all calculated per contract using each contract's real point value, whether trades are imported via CSV or synced automatically from a supported platform.