Contango Report: WTI Stays In Steady Contango
By Sumit Roy | October 08, 2012

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Featured Commodity

CONTANGO WATCH: Despite spiking prices and a shortage of gasoline, crude oil prices held relatively firm last week. The U.S. benchmark, WTI, remains in steady contango.

As refineries shut down from planned and unplanned outages, demand for crude oil falls in the short term, pressuring prices. On the other hand, product prices—particularly gasoline prices—have rallied aggressively higher and the benchmark RBOB contract on the CME is in steep backwardation with roll yields near 190 percent annualized.

ROLL COSTS: It costs investors 5.41 percent annualized to roll front-month WTI contracts, up from 4.53 percent.

BOTTOM LINE: Contango

Has oil moved into backwardation yet? What does corn's roll yield look like? How do you know when it's time to buy—or sell?

Each week, we investigate the futures curves of the most important commodities in the U.S., helping investors better understand the market and seize buy-and-sell opportunities as soon as they arise. For an easy-to-understand explanation of contango, backwardation and roll yields, please click here to go to our Hard Assets University.

To see current contango curve and front-month roll costs for each of our selected commodities, please select a sector or commodity below (or read the whole report ):

Data as of close on October 5, 2012
Data courtesy IndexUniverse.com

Energy

Agricultural Commodities

Precious Metals

Soft Commodities

Industrial Metals

		Current Roll	Previous Week's Roll	Past Year Average Roll	Historical 10/05 5YR Annualized Roll
Energy	WTI	5.41%	4.53%	0.31%	2.63%
	Brent	-8.30%	-8.76%	-0.57%	2.27%
	HH Natural Gas	177.89%	170.14%	3.40%	200.88%
Precious Metals	Gold	0.64%	0.64%	0.13%	1.17%
	Silver	-10.90%	-6.85%	0.14%	-1.06%
	Platinum	0.09%	-3.86%	0.25%	1.13%
	Palladium	0.62%	0.81%	0.25%	1.44%
Industrial Metals	Copper	0.14%	0.22%	-0.01%	0.33%
	Aluminum	6.46%	5.70%	0.53%	6.68%
	Zinc	6.29%	5.45%	0.14%	4.61%
	Lead	0.00%	-0.66%	0.28%	2.52%
	Nickel	1.32%	1.11%	0.10%	1.91%
	Tin	0.27%	-1.09%	0.05%	-2.14%
Agricultural Commodities	Corn	0.14%	1.72%	-1.27%	10.20%
	Wheat	5.11%	4.90%	2.25%	16.97%
	Soybeans	-1.07%	0.85%	-0.20%	5.02%
	Live Cattle	18.11%	19.32%	1.25%	7.54%
	Lean Hogs	51.08%	66.00%	0.82%	65.50%
Soft Commodities	Coffee C	9.63%	8.94%	1.12%	9.02%
	Cocoa	2.38%	2.46%	0.76%	3.38%
	Sugar #11	-1.39%	-0.29%	-0.77%	-13.19%
	Cotton #2	4.83%	5.65%	-0.27%	8.61%