Are forward curves useful tools for trading decisions and which informations can be gathered from them?
As far as trading is concerned, these forward curves are the price at which you can speculate on the future value of the commodity.  Basically, if you want to speculate on gold, you can either buy the physical and store it somewhere (which may have significant costs) or you can buy futures (ETFs typically hold futures or hold physical and store it for you).  If you buy futures, you will have to roll your position every month, meaning you sell the current month's futures and buy the next month's.  However, these may not be trading at the same price, so each time you roll your position, you face a risk.  If you know you want to hold gold for exactly 1 year, then you can buy a 1-year future, which in this case according to your graph will cost you about $10 more than buying the front month.  The forward curve (or sometimes called the futures term structure) represents the prices at which gold can be bought or sold at various points in the future. The forward curve for gold says little, in my opinion, about the expected price of gold. The Jan 16 price is 7.9% (or so) higher than the Jan 12 price. This reflects the current cost of money, today's low interest rates. When the short rates were 5%, the price 4 years out would be about 20% higher. No magic there. (The site you linked to was in German, so I looked and left. I'm certain if you pulled up the curve for platinum or silver, it would have the identical shape, that 7.9% rise over 4 years.) The yield curve, on the other hand,  Is said to provide an indication of the direction of the economy, a steep curve forecasting positive growth.
"Simply put, you cannot deterministically beat the market. If by being informed and following all relevant news, you can arrive at the conclusion that company A will likely outperform company B in the future, then having A stocks should be better than having B stocks or any (e.g., index based) mix of them. But as the whole market has access to the very same information and will arrive at the same conclusion (provided it is logically sound), ""everybody"" will want A stocks, which thus become expensive to the point where the expected return is average again.  Your only options of winning this race are to be the very first to have the important information (insider trade), or to arrive at different logical conclusions than the rest of the world (which boils down do making decisions that are not logically sound - good luck with that - or assuming that almost everybody else is not logically sound - go figure)." What are Pivot Points? Pivot Points indicate price levels that are of significance in technical analysis of securities. Pivot Points are used to provide clarity for a trader as they are a predictive indicator of where a security might go. There are at least 6 different types of Pivot Points (Woodie Pivot Point, Fibonacci Pivot, Demark etc..) and they are different based on their formulas but generally serve the same concept. I will be answering your question using the Camarilla Pivot Point formula. Camarilla Pivot Point Formula Generally any Pivot Point formula uses a combination of the Open, High, Low and Close of the previous timeframe. Since you are technically a swing trader indicated by  say between a couple of days to a couple of weeks, as I don't want to   do day trading you should use a weekly 5 to 30 minute chart but you can also use a daily chart as well. So for example if you use a daily chart, you would use the Open, High, Low and Close of the previous day. Example of fictitious stock: MOSEX (Money Stack Exchange) 01/14/16: Open: 10.25, High: 12.55, Low: 9.65, Close: 11.50 On 01/15/16: R4 Level: 13.10, R3 Level: 12.30, R2 Level: 12.03, R1 Level: 11.77, Pivot Point: 11.23, S1 Level: 11.23, S2 Level: 10.97, S3 Level: 10.70, S4 Level: 9.91 R = Resistance, S = Support  How to identify these Pivot Points? Most charting software already have built in overlays that will identify the pivot points for you but you can always find and draw them yourself with an annotation tool. Since we are using the Camarilla Pivot Point formula, the important Pivot Point levels are the R4 which is considered as the Breakout Pivot, the S4 which is considered as the Breakdown Pivot. R3 and S3 are Reversal Pivot Points. Once identify the Pivot Points how should you proceed in a trade? This is the million dollar question and without spoon feeding you requires you to come up with your own strategy. To distinguish yourself from being a novice and pro trader is to have a strategy in a trade. Now I don't really have the time to look for actual charts to provide examples with but generally this is what you should look for to proceed in a trade: Potential Buy/Short Signals: Potential Sell Signals: If a stock moves above the R3 Level but then crosses below it, this would be a sell signal. This is confirmed when their is a lower lower then the candle that first crosses below it. Sell a stock when S4 Level is confirmed. See above for the confirmation. Other Useful Tips: Use the Pivot Point as your support or resistance. The Pivot Point levels can be used for your stop loss. For example, with an S3 reversal buy signal, the S4 should be used as a stop loss. Conversely, the Pivot Point levels can also be used for your target prices. For example, with an S3 reversal buy signal, you should take some profits at R3 level. You should also use a combination of other indicators to give you more information to confirm if a signal is correct. Examples of a good combination is the RSI, MACD and Moving Averages. Read that book in my comment above!! As stated in the comments, Index Funds are the way to go. Stocks have the best return on investment, if you can stomach the volatility, and the diversification index funds bring you is unbeatable, while keeping costs low.  You don't need an Individual Savings Account (UK), 401(k) (US) or similar, though they would be helpful to boost investment performance. These are tax advantaged accounts; without them you will have to pay taxes on your investment gains. However, there's still a lot to gain from investing, specially if the alternative is to place them in the vault or similar. Bear in mind that inflation makes your money shrink in real terms. Even a small interest is better than no interest.  By best I mean that is safe (regulated by the financial authorities, so your money is safe and insured up to a certain amount) and has reasonable fees (keeping costs low is a must in any scenario).  The two main concerns when designing your portfolio are diversification and low TER (Total Expense Ratio). As when we chose broker, our concern is to be as safe as we possibly can (diversification helps with this) and to keep costs at the bare minimum.  Some issues might restrict your election or make others seem better. Depending on the country you live and the one of the fund, you might have to pay more taxes on gains/dividends. e.g. The US keeps some of them if your country doesn't have a special treaty with them. Look for W-8Ben and tax withholding for more information.  Vanguard and Blackrock offer nice index funds. Morningstar might be a good place for gathering information. Don't trust blindly the 'rating'. Some values are 'not rated' and kick ass the 4 star ones. Again: seek low TER. Not a big fan of this point, but I'm bound to mention it. It can be actually helpful for sorting out tax related issues, which might decide the kind of index fund you pick, and if you find this topic somewhat daunting. You start with a good chunk of money, so it might make even more sense in your scenario to hire someone knowledgeable and trustworthy. I hope this helps to get you started. Best of luck. "Your inference in #1 is incorrect.  The million dollars he has contributed is going to be part of the assets of the fund.  This is common practice and is a way for the founder to express confidence that the fund will make money.  He wants you to come up with a model that he can then use to trade those assets.  Presumably he will give you some money if he uses your model and it works. Regarding #2, there are lots of ways of getting data.  Sometimes you can buy it directly from the exchange.  You can also buy from vendors like tickdata.com.  There are lots of such vendors.  Since he makes a big deal about saying it's expensive, I'm assuming he is talking about data at relatively high frequency (not daily, which would be cheap).  Stock data is still not bad.  Complete US data would be a few thousand dollars (maybe 20K at the most).  For someone sitting at home with no capital, that's a lot of money, but for a hedge fund it's nothing. As an institutional investor, your broker will give you a data feed that will provide all prices in real time (but not historically).  If he's been in operation a while, he could have just saved the prices as they came out of the pipe.  I don't think that's the case here, though, based on how young he is and how little money is involved. In short, he paid for some data and has ""encrypted"" it in such a way that he can legally share it for free.  Supposedly his method preserves the structure so that you could write a trading model based on the encrypted data and it would work on real data.  Once you have a good trading model, you sell it to him and he will use it to trade his million dollars and whatever other money he is able to gather." R/stockmarket is probably the best.  When I have some free time I can test that strategy back as long as you would like in quantstrat, although the only problem with testing futures is joining the consolidated contracts, however I can test it with SPY as SPY returns and ES_F track very closely. Machine learning is definitely applied to trading, but I have not tried it myself. For now I've been focused on figuring out the platforms and how they work; I have not been trying out other strategies besides a SMAC strategy. The most machine learning-like application I've attempted was cross-validation by walk-forward analysis (I'm publishing that post on Monday).  I know nothing about TensorFlow other than it's used for deep learning and that it doesn't work on Windows and thus would not work on my more powerful gaming computer, and like I said above, I have not been exploring machine learning right now. Neural networks are on my radar, on the list of things I need to read, but there was a topic on r/algotrading recently where most users said that deep learning has not demonstrated better performance than more traditional ML techniques and looks like a fad. I want to convince myself of that first, though.  I'm glad you enjoyed the post and my site! Thank you! CFDs should not be used as a buy and hold strategy (which is risky enough doing with shares directly). However, with proper money and risk management and the proper use of stop losses, a medium term strategy is very plausible.  I was using CFDs in the past over a short time period of usually between a couple of days to a couple is weeks, trying to catch small swings with very tight stops. I kept getting wipsawed due to my stops being too tight so had too many small loses for my few bigger wins. And yes I lost some money, almost $5k in one year. I have recently started a more medium term strategy with wider stops trying to catch trending stocks. I have only recently started this strategy and so far have 2 loses and 3 wins. Just remember that you do get charged a financing fee for holding long position overnight, buy for short position you actually get paid the funding fee for overnight positions. My broker charges the official interest rate + 2.5% for long positions and pays the official rate - 2.5% for short positions. So yes CFDs can be used for the longer term as long as you are implementing proper money and risk management and use stop losses. Just be aware of the implications of using margin and all the costs involved. id like to start by saying youre still doing this yourself, and i dont actually have all the info required anyway, dont send it but  &gt;[3] Descriptive Statistical Measures: Provide a thorough discussion of the meaning and interpretation of the four descriptive &gt;statistical measures required in your analysis: (1) Arithmetic Mean, (2) Variance, (3) Standard Deviation and (4) Coefficient of &gt;Variation. For example, how are these measures related to each other? In order to develop this discussion, you may want to &gt;consult chapters 2 and 3 of your textbook. This topic is an important part of your report. can be easily interpreted, im guessing the mean is simply just the observed (and then projected stock price for future models) the standard deviation determines the interval in which the stock price fluctuates. so you have like a curve, and then on this curve theirs a bunch of normal distributions modeling the variance of the price plotted against the month  also the coefficient of variation is just r^2 so just read up on that and relate it to the meaning of it to the numbers you have  actually my stats are pretty rusty so make sure you really check into these things  but otherwise the formulas for part 4 is simple too. you can compare means of a certain month using certain equations, but there are different ones for certain situations  you can test for significance by comparing the differences of the means and if its outside of your alpha level then it probably means your company is significantly different from the SP index. (take mu of SP - mu of callaway)  you can also find more info on interpreting the two different coefficients your given if you look up comparing means of linear regression models or something