Curving Futures Blog

…at least if you ask Yahoo! finance.

So, the twitter feed sometimes gives erroneous results if the one year, and six month out contracts haven’t seen a trade in a few hours and oil has moved 7% or something since the last tick.

That said, we shorted the updates from 6 months and a year, to 3 months and a 6 months. And, we also added a check, and the tweet will contain a warning:

But, the last trades were > 1 hour ago

If there has been more than an hour since the 3 month or the 6 month contract has traded last. So, you can use your discretion when interpreting the tweet.

I programmed the roll.

I fixed the @curvingfutures 2x per day tweeter…basically just added error checking, so it won’t tweet errors.

I added support for a bunch of other contracts that I was collecting data for on the home page.

The “generate your own plots” is almost 100% functional…except for where data doesn’t exist.  That, I need to fix.

I added a page to show implied volatility of gold and oil, since those guys aren’t plotted anywhere online either.

Does it ever seem, like every retail investor you meet, doesn’t understand how oil ETFs roll forward each month?

Just wanted to state the obvious, since some people are worried, the creators of curvingfutures.com know how the ETFs roll. We understand you cannot profit from contango by buying USO now and selling it in 6 months for a 21% gain.  (Duh?) 

We do want to point out, that you can buy the front month and sell the back end of the curve, if you have the infrastructure to take delivery of the physical.

Went live today, just testing the cron jobs for the twitter feed…

First thing I want to add, is the user option, to bring up any historic plot.  Second thing will be to add the interface to load any contract.  Third will be an option to change the size of the plot, and the code, that gets generated.  What else?

…I’m no guru web developer, but I’m still tweaking the automated daily data collection, and parsing algorithms.  I’m also I think I’m done tweaking the MySQL database still.

And, I haven’t programmed the rollover yet, but it isn’t perfect. not sure what is going to happen.  For now, I’m done playing with it. I’ll likely have to hard code some things, for the near future.

So for now, But be warned, some data may be erroneous or delayed, or not even available at all.  For instance, you might check back, and the the site won’t work at all.

I might take down the site, sometimes, to add features or fix bugs…normally it shouldn’t take me any longer than an hour or so.

…it all started with this.  I looked, but I couldn’t find anywhere online was actually plotting the curves…for free. 

This made it difficult for me to explain the concept of the oil contango killing value in the oil ETFs.  I also wanted to monitor the curves, because I didn’t thing oil was going to really start to rally, until the curve lied down.  Sure enough, the week I spent developing the site, the oil curve has backed off relative to its previous climb, and oil has started to rally.

It started out, just to see if I could actually build the site, for my personal use…and, I don’t know if it will turn into anything really useful…I’ll wait and see about the feedback I get, to see if I develop more features.

I have lots of ideas, on what I could do, with the data the site is going to collect daily.

If you have any, requests or ideas, I would like to hear them.