Contango & Backwardation in Commodity Forward Markets

The speaker provides a detailed overview of the price movements of futures contracts.  These concepts are known as contango and backwardation; he further goes on to cover Normal Contango and Normal Backwardation.  He also discusses how different commodities have different seasonality which can result in a backwardation.

Contango refers to a forward price of a commodity being higher than the spot price while backwardation refers to the forward price being lower than the spot price.  This is common in some commodities during different times of the year; however, it is uncommon in some commodities such as gold and silver.