Crude Oil Trading: Over $75,000 in 2026 with Two Trend-Following Strategies

Welcome back to another installment of our regular overview of the systems included in our systematic trading portfolio. This time, we’re focusing on crude oil futures, one of the world’s most important and actively traded commodities, which has been back in the spotlight in recent months due in part to geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and the resulting price movements.

Periods of sharp price swings can create interesting conditions for trend-following strategies, which are specifically designed to identify directional moves and attempt to ride them for as long as the trend remains in place.

In this article, we’ll analyze two trend-following trading systems on WTI Crude Oil futures (CL) that use different entry logic but managed to generate a combined profit of more than $75,000 while trading a single contract during the first seven months of 2026.

Both strategies trade on the long and short sides and hold positions for multiple days, with a maximum trade duration of five days. Let’s take a closer look at how they work.

Breakout Trend-Following Strategy on CL Crude Oil Futures

The first strategy, which operates on 30-minute bars, defines its entry levels based on the previous session’s highs and lows. When price breaks through these levels, the system enters long or short, respectively, attempting to follow the trend.

The strategy does not enter short positions on Fridays and uses an ADX filter, allowing entries only when the indicator is below a certain threshold, signaling a period of price compression. It also uses two neutral price patterns as additional filters, along with an additional directional pattern applied only to short trades.

Positions are closed on Fridays in all cases, or earlier if the stop loss, breakeven, or profit target is reached.

As shown in Figure 2, the strategy came off a very strong 2025 and continued performing well in 2026, generating as much as $35,820 in profit during the first seven months of the year by taking advantage of the sharp volatility in crude oil prices.

Trend-Following Strategy on Crude Oil Using Moving Averages

The second strategy trades both long and short on a 15-minute time frame with a multiday holding period. It executes a maximum of two trades per session and uses a crossover between a faster and a slower moving average as its entry trigger.

Entries are further filtered by a single neutral pattern that identifies a contraction in the price range over recent sessions. Positions are closed if the standard stop loss, profit target, or breakeven level is reached.

Given the sharp upward and downward moves that are common in this market, however, the strategy also includes an additional exit condition. If price moves a certain percentage away from the entry price within the first few bars after entering the market, the position can be closed early.

This acts as an early profit-taking mechanism, set below the fixed profit target, and is designed to prevent a rapid price retracement from eroding a potentially significant gain achieved within a short period of time.

Figure 3 shows several trades executed by the strategy in the most recent period, including four profit targets that were hit. One of them, labeled FRUp in the figure, which stands for Fast Run Up, is the early profit-taking exit described above.

Overall, this strategy generated as much as $40,010 in profit during the first seven months of 2026 while trading a single contract, after also closing 2025 with strong results.

Crude Oil Trading: Two Different Strategies for Following Trends

The two strategies analyzed here are based on the same underlying principle: attempting to capitalize on directional moves in crude oil. However, they do so in two different ways.

The first looks for breakouts above or below the previous session’s high or low, while the second uses a crossover between two moving averages as a signal to identify the potential presence of a trend.

This is also an interesting consideration from a portfolio perspective. Systematically trading the same market does not necessarily mean always using the same logic: different entry triggers, time frames, filters, and position management rules can cause trading systems to react differently to the same market conditions.

Conclusions: Over $75,000 with Two Crude Oil Trading Systems

During the first seven months of 2026, these two trend-following strategies on CL Crude Oil futures successfully capitalized on the sharp price movements that characterized the market, generating a combined $75,830 in profit while trading a single contract.

Of course, these results reflect a specific market environment and do not mean that strategies of this type can produce similar performance under all market conditions. Trend-following trading systems inevitably experience less favorable periods and drawdowns as well.

This is precisely why, in systematic trading, we don’t focus solely on the recent performance of an individual strategy. Instead, we focus on building systems based on precise rules, testing them on historical data, and combining them within a diversified portfolio.

For traders with smaller accounts, the Micro WTI Crude Oil (MCL) contract is also available and is one-tenth the size of the standard CL contract. Assuming the same market movements and trading logic, profits, losses, and overall exposure are therefore proportionally smaller.

If you’d like to learn more about our approach and understand how we develop and test systematic strategies on crude oil and other major markets, you can book a free call with our team using the button below.

One of our tutors will answer your questions and explain how our scientific approach to the markets works.

Happy trading, and we’ll see you in the next portfolio overview!