Commodity Forward Curve
Get the forward/futures curve for a commodity from Yahoo Finance – the historical daily closing price of each dated futures contract over the next contracts calendar months (e.g. Crude Oil’s December 2026, January 2027, … contracts), rather than a single flat continuous/spot price.
This is what a Schwartz-Smith (2000) two-factor commodity price model needs to back out the convenience-yield term structure under the risk-neutral (Q) measure – the curve’s shape (contango or backwardation) at each point in time is exactly what a single spot price series cannot reveal.
Not every commodity has a listed contract for every calendar month (grains in particular only trade specific delivery months), so months with no listed contract are silently skipped – the number of columns returned can be fewer than contracts.
Also known as: futures term structure, forward curve.
Commodity Forward Curve in Python
get_commodity_forward_curve is part of the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_commodity_forward_curve as shown below.
from financetoolkit import Economics
economics = Economics(start_date='2026-01-01', end_date='2026-08-01')
economics.get_commodity_forward_curve("Crude Oil", contracts=6)
Which returns:
| Date | 2026-09 | 2026-10 | 2026-11 | 2026-12 | 2027-01 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-27 | 82.61 | 80.25 | 78.17 | 76.53 | 75.31 |
| 2026-07-28 | 79.26 | 77.17 | 75.33 | 73.85 | 72.74 |
| 2026-07-29 | 84.46 | 82.04 | 79.68 | 77.74 | 76.28 |
| 2026-07-30 | 83.59 | 80.8 | 78.19 | 76.12 | 74.65 |
| 2026-07-31 | 84.67 | 81.49 | 78.65 | 76.44 | 74.88 |
Parameters
get_commodity_forward_curve accepts the following parameters:
- commodity (str): The commodity to retrieve the curve for. One of “Crude Oil”, “Natural Gas”, “Gold”, “Silver”, “Copper”, “Corn”, “Wheat” or “Soybeans”.
- contracts (int, optional): The number of sequential monthly contracts ahead of today to attempt to fetch. Defaults to 12.
- rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.