#contango

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

The shape of the crypto dated-futures curve and the annualised basis at every expiry, read live from Deribit's public futures book — no key, nothing stored. A single spot price tells you nothing about what the market pays to hold a position over time: dated futures trade at a premium (contango) or a discount (backwardation) to spot, and that premium, annualised, is the cash-and-carry yield basis traders harvest. The curve endpoint returns, for a currency (BTC or ETH), the spot index, the perpetual and every listed dated future — each with its days to expiry, mark price, the absolute and percent basis to spot and the annualised basis — plus the overall curve shape (contango or backwardation) and the front- and back-month annualised basis. The basis endpoint returns the annualised basis (cash-and-carry yield) for a chosen expiry, or the front future. This is the futures-curve / term-structure cut for crypto — distinct from the spot-versus-perpetual basis API (a single point on the curve), and from the funding-rate, options, max-pain, gamma and price APIs in the catalogue. Currency is BTC or ETH; expiry is a Deribit code like 26JUN26.

api.oanor.com/futurescurve-api

Live crypto spot-versus-perpetual basis and premium as an API, served from the Bybit v5 feed. The basis is the gap between a coin's perpetual-futures price and its spot price: when the perp trades above spot the market is in contango (leveraged longs are paying up), when below it is in backwardation. For any coin this returns the spot price, the perp last, mark and index price, the basis in absolute and percentage terms, the mark-to-index premium, the market structure, and the funding rate — per-8-hour and annualised — that arbitrages the basis away. Get a coin's basis, or scan the majors ranked by basis. The cash-and-carry and funding-arbitrage signal layer for trading and dashboard apps. Live, no key, no cache. Distinct from funding-rate, open-interest and price APIs — this is the spot-perp basis.

api.oanor.com/cryptobasis-api