Continuous Contract
A synthetic price series stitching together successive front-month contracts to produce an unbroken historical chart for analysis.
A continuous contract is a charting construct that concatenates successive futures contracts into a single price series. Because each individual contract starts and ends, raw futures data is fragmented — continuous contracts solve this for backtesting and technical analysis.
There are two common methods of stitching: back-adjustment (shifting historical prices to remove roll gaps, preserving relative changes) and forward-adjustment (adjusting old data to current nominal prices). Back-adjustment is standard in most platforms (TradingView @ES1!, Sierra Chart).
Awareness matters: the adjusted price on a continuous chart may differ substantially from the actual contract price on any historical date — never use it for historical P&L calculations.