Forward Curve

Forward Curve in Tradesignal 6A Forward Curve in Tradesignal allows commodity traders to obtain a visualization of the forward or futures prices on a given date for a given commodity.

The Forward Curve plots the current price of a given forward contract against the expiration date of the contract. The current prices or prices from any previous day may be plotted in such a way.

Forward Curves are available as of Tradesignal 5.5 and underwent a redesign in Tradesignal 6 making them usable in the same way as other charts, i.e. you can apply indicators and strategies to them. Workspaces containing forward curves created in versions prior to Tradesignal 6 need to be recreated to be able to use the new features.

Forward Curves in Tradesignal 6

Creating a Forward Curve Chart

Forward Curve WizardYou can access the Forward Curve Wizard from the Toolbar by clicking on the Forward Curve button in the Insert group. It allows you to select symbol lists containing commodities or other futures and set the Date alignment and Displacement properties.

You can also drag a symbol list of commodities onto a chart, this will prompt you if you want to create a Forward Curve or insert all symbols contained in the list into the chart. If you enter the symbol shortcut for a continuous contract, e.g. "Sc1" for a contract series for soy beans, into the command line, you can select the option New Forward Curve from the drop-down menu.

As of version 6.1 of Tradesignal you can also create a forward curve from a user-defined list of forward contract symbols. Please be aware that for this feature to work, it will be necessary to manually mark existing user-defined lists as supporting forward curves using the Allow Forward Curves option in the list's context menu.

If you want to display the names of each contract as a label near each price point, you can apply the supplied Forward Curve Label indicator.

Properties of a Forward Curve Chart

You can edit the properties of a Forward Curve chart either during its creation in the wizard or use the property inspector in the Toolbox.

There are two properties specific to Forward Curves:

• Date Alignment - The expiry date of each contract will be aligned according to this setting, useful if you want to align multiple different forward curves.
• Displacement - The displacement property governs what value to show for each contract in the forward curve. A value of 0 means use the current value, 1 means use the value of the previous bar, etc.

Forward Curves in earlier versions of Tradesignal

Forward Curve in Tradesignal 5

Forward Curve Setup

You can open a Forward Curve directly from the Toolbar by clicking on the Forward Curve button in the Insert group. Commodity symbol lists may then be dragged and dropped from the Symbols section of the Toolbox into the newly opened chart.

As a shortcut, open the context menu for a commodity symbol list and select the option Insert as Forward Curve.

Adding, Removing and Moving Securities

Additional commodities can be added to the same chart by drag&drop of an appropriate symbol list.

Items can be removed from a chart by displaying the context menu for an item in the chart and selecting Delete, or by selecting an item in the chart and pressing the Delete key.

Items can be moved within a chart by drag&drop between existing sub-charts. To create a new sub-chart, drag the item outside of its current sub-chart and drop it.

Displaying a Forward Curve for a Previous Day

The easiest way to display yesterday's curve, is to select the current days curve and press the Yesterdays Curve button on the Toolbar. You can also use the same named context menu option for a curve. The actual number of days back that a curve displays can be configured using the Displacement (Days) property of a curve.

Creating a Spread Between Forward Curves

Creating a spreadCreating a new curve based on the values of other existing curve is achieved by clicking the Create Spread button on the Toolbar to bring up the Create Spread Dialog. In this dialog up to three commodities found in the current chart can be selected and mathematical operators chosen.

Clicking Create will plot the new spread curve into a subchart. This new curve can be edited by choosing Edit Spread from its context menu.

Important Properties

Property	Description
Background Color	The background color of a sub-chart.
Scale Back Color	Color of the scale background.
Scale Text Color	Color of the scale text.
Logarithmic	Set to true to use logarithmic price scales.
Axis Alignment	Display the price axis to the left or right of the chart.
Font	The font style and size that the chart should use.
Legend Position	How the chart legend should be positioned.
Date Alignment	The granularity of the date scale. Data points will be compressed to days, months, quarters or years.
Normalize	Normalizes price values into a percentage range relative to the first data point. Useful for comparing the relative development of prices for disparate securities.
Line Color	The color of the forward curve line.
Line Style	Solid, dashed or dash-dot.
Displacement	The number of days back for which to calculate the forward curve.
Visible	Set to false to hide a given curve (useful to hide the underlying components of a spread chart).
Labels	Set to true to show price labels attached to the displayed data points.
Fill Area	Set to true to display the curve as a filled area chart.
Currency	The currency for the quoted prices. This value may be changed to another currency for which conversion data is available.
Data Quality	The delay (if any) on the displayed prices.
Unit	The trade unit of the displayed commodity. This value can be changed to another convertible unit.
Exchange	The exchange on which the displayed commodity is traded.