#backwardation

The shape of the commodity futures curve — contango versus backwardation — and the roll yield it pays, computed live from Yahoo Finance dated futures contracts, no key, nothing stored. A single commodity price hides the most important thing about it: what the market charges to hold it forward. When deferred contracts cost MORE than the front (an upward curve, contango) a long futures position bleeds money as it rolls up the curve each month; when they cost LESS (a downward curve, backwardation — classic for crude oil in tight markets) the roll pays you. That roll yield, not the spot move, is what drives the long-run return of commodity-index investing. This API reads the actual dated contracts — the front month and the deferred months out the curve — for crude oil, natural gas, gasoline, gold, silver, copper, corn, wheat and soybeans, and returns the full term structure, the front-to-second-month roll yield annualised, the curve shape and the front-vs-back spread. The curve endpoint returns one commodity's full chain; the screener endpoint ranks every commodity by roll yield, separating the backwardated markets (positive carry for a long) from the contango ones (negative carry). This is the commodity futures term-structure / roll-yield cut — distinct from the crypto dated-futures curve API, the inter-commodity crack/crush spread API, the commodity-momentum and seasonality APIs and the spot price feeds. It is the carry, read straight off the curve.

api.oanor.com/commoditycurve-api

The shape of the equity volatility curve — the single most-watched regime signal in the options world — computed live from Yahoo Finance, no key, nothing stored. A VIX level tells you how scared the market is right now; the term structure tells you whether that fear is short-term panic or a calm, persistent state, and which way it is rolling. This API reads the S&P 500 implied-volatility curve across four tenors — the 9-day VIX, the headline 30-day VIX, the 3-month VIX and the 6-month VIX — and turns it into a regime. When the curve slopes up (VIX < VIX3M < VIX6M) the market is in contango: calm, with near-term vol cheaper than far, the state short-vol strategies harvest. When it inverts to backwardation (VIX above VIX3M) the front end is bid above the back: acute stress, fear spiking, historically near capitulation. The structure endpoint returns the live curve, the contango ratio (VIX / VIX3M), the short-end ratio (VIX9D / VIX), the roll yield a short-vol position would earn, the slope classification and a regime read, with VVIX (the vol of the VIX) for context. The history endpoint returns the daily time series of the contango ratio and flags every backwardation day. The percentile endpoint places today's contango ratio in its one-year range. This is the volatility term-structure / contango-backwardation cut — distinct from the cross-asset VIX-family level board, the crypto DVOL index and the realised-volatility APIs. It is the shape of fear, not its level.

api.oanor.com/vixterm-api