Seasonals are great, but don't use them alone. These charts were developed in order to judge the reliability of a seasonal and show what is actually the first step in creating seasonals. They are made by shifting the contracts in time of a particular month for a chosen commodity so that the expiration dates coincide. Note that this may result in some dates being projected into the future. Also, since the contracts have been shortened to include only the last 375 trading days (about a year and a half), the open contracts will usually have the earliest starting dates.

1. Pick a commodity and a month.

2. Select the chart type. The jpegs are faster; the applets are interactive (zooming in is possible and there are data popups).

3. Select the number of years of data.

4. Press "Get Chart". There's a lot of data to download, so be patient.

This is a limited set of commodities available to nonsubscribers. Subscribers can access data for over 40 commodities.