Resolve the underlying contract
A market-family label is not a futures contract identity. Preserve the specific underlying identifier, month and year where applicable, and product family. CME’s contract-details guide explains the role of the underlying futures instrument. Your implementation should retain that relationship explicitly rather than attach the option to a changing front-month chart alias.
Keep the clocks independent
An option expiry does not define the complete lifecycle of its underlying future. Keep the option’s events separate from the future’s last trading and delivery-related information. An account’s resulting position requires actual account events; it cannot be reconstructed confidently from a read-only quotation response alone.
Translate ticks with a documented convention
Store the original quote representation, numeric normalization, tick size, tick value and quantity units. Test a one-tick example and an invalid increment. Do not label a premium estimate as total capital required, and do not reuse a decimal conversion from another product without checking its definition.
Protect research at the roll boundary
A continuous futures series is a research transformation, not the identity of every option’s underlying. Preserve any roll methodology separately and ensure that changing the display month does not alter archived mappings. The related article develops a small relationship-graph test for catching exactly this error.
