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.
Related Terms
Front Month
The nearest-expiry futures contract with the highest liquidity and trading volume at any given time.
BeginnerRoll Date
The session when volume and open interest migrate from the expiring futures contract to the next contract month.
IntermediateRollover
Closing a near-expiry futures position and simultaneously reopening it in the next contract month to maintain exposure without taking delivery.
Intermediate