When I first started trading a prop account it must have been the 4th quarter of 2011. Many futures have quarterly expiration and delivery dates, in the months of Mar, Jun, Sep and Dec. To denote the particular quarter of the contract, a cumbersome and non-intuitive lettering system is implemented by the gods of finance to make it clear what month it was, without having to fully pen down the name of the month. In our example, Mar, Jun, Sep and Dec are known as H, M, U and Z respectively. Then, to tack on the additional information of what year it was, you would just add the digit in the ones column of the year, behind the alphabet. So if you were trading the Sep contract and it was 2012, then with or without you the market would fully describe it as U2. If it was December 2013 you ......