The unrecognized futures contract warning

What this does

After importing a futures file you may see a warning naming a contract code, saying it was imported with a multiplier of 1 and that the P&L may be inaccurate. It appears in the result panel alongside the import counts, and it is easy to scroll past.

It is a warning rather than an error because the trade did import. The dates, the symbol and the quantity are all correct. Only the money is wrong.

What a multiplier is

A futures multiplier is the cash value of one point of price movement in one contract.

P&L = (exit price - entry price) x contracts x multiplier

ES has a multiplier of 50, so a one point move on one contract is 50 US dollars. With a multiplier of 1, the same move is recorded as one dollar. A trade imported under this warning is understated by exactly the real multiplier. An ES trade shows a fiftieth of its true result, a CL trade a thousandth.

Why the contract was not recognised

Futures symbols are a root, a month code and a year: ESH25 is the March 2025 E-mini S&P, MGCQ6 is the August 2026 Micro Gold. Both one-digit and two-digit years are read.

VEXA resolves the root against a list of contract specifications. A root that is not on that list has no known multiplier, and rather than inventing one, VEXA imports the trade at 1 and tells you.

Common roots and their multipliers:

The full list also covers natural gas, the refined products, copper, platinum and palladium, the treasury complex, the major currency futures, the grains, and both full-size and micro crypto futures. A contract outside all of that is what triggers the warning.

Steps

What you do depends on where the trade came from.

What you should see

An import with no warning, and futures P&L that agrees with your broker’s statement to rounding. On the Portfolio page, an open futures position whose contract size could not be confirmed carries a Multiplier unverified badge, which is the same problem seen from the other side.

The AI import behaves differently on purpose

The web-only AI import stops on an unknown futures contract rather than importing at 1. It tells you which symbol it could not resolve and imports nothing.

That is deliberate. A warning at the bottom of a result panel is easy to miss, and futures P&L that is wrong by a factor of fifty is worse than an import that did not happen. The classic broker-file path keeps the warning behaviour because those files are usually large and mostly valid. The other guards on that path are covered in Import from an unsupported broker with VEXA AI Import.

If it doesn’t work

• The warning is gone but the P&L is still wrong. The multiplier may be right and something else wrong. See Your P&L does not match your broker.
• You corrected the template and the old figures are still showing. Check you edited the rows for those exact trades. A fill already imported is skipped, so a corrected row has to describe the same fill for the correction to land.
• Options are wrong rather than futures. Options use a contract size of 100 by default and are a different mechanism. See How options trades are imported.

Related

• How futures contracts are imported
• Your P&L does not match your broker
• Symbol formats for the CSV template