Futures Expiry: What's the use for "##-##"?

[saliva]

When selecting the expiry month for a given futures contract within the Instrument Manager, I notice there's "##-##" at the bottom. What is that and when is that used?

I've been told that it is used for constructing continuous historical data. But in NT7, this feature seems redundant since I can retrieve intraday historical data going back as far as 12 months (sometimes it crashed when I pushed it out beyond that).

BTW does anyone know if these data are adjusted or unadjusted?

[NinjaTrader_Austin]

saliva, some data providers actually construct a continuous contract that can be viewed with the ##-## "expiration".

The data is most likely adjusted in some way, but you'd have to contact your data provider to find out.

The reason for these contracts is so you could, for example, run a 3 year backtest on a contract. This would require merging 36 monthly contracts (CL, NG, etc) or 12 quarterly contracts (ES, NQ, TF, ZB, etc) in order to get an accurate representation of how that contract was traded.

Please note that most of these contracts have zero to little volume for a long time before expiration, which could result in bad data if you tried to backtest a single contract for many expirations (like a 12 month backtest on a single month/expiration of CL).