Charting the Spread Between Quarterly and Current-Week Futures

Summary

This small trading-terminal plugin plots the price difference between quarterly and current-week futures contracts. It retrieves five-minute records for each contract, aligns the most recent observations by their array positions, subtracts the current-week close from the quarterly close, and plots the resulting spread against the quarterly record timestamps. The stated use is spread monitoring for hedging analysis and manual trading.

The document describes a charting utility rather than an automated trading strategy: it provides no entry rules, hedge ratios, execution logic, or performance evidence. Its spread series can help visualize how the two contracts diverge over time, but position sizing and hedge effectiveness are left to the user. Since records are aligned by index rather than explicitly matched timestamps, missing or differently sampled bars could misalign observations. The material does not discuss fees, funding, contract specifications, or roll effects, all of which may matter when interpreting or trading the spread.

Key ideas

• The plugin charts the price difference between quarterly and current-week futures contracts.
• It uses five-minute close prices and plots the spread with quarterly-contract timestamps.
• The tool is intended for spread monitoring and hedging analysis, not automated execution.
• The document provides no trading rules or evidence of strategy performance.
• Index-based record alignment may misstate the spread if timestamps or samples differ.

Tags

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.