Futures term structure is the pattern of prices for contracts on the same underlying market across different maturities at a single point in time. Plotted by contract month or expiration, those prices form the futures curve. It is a cross-sectional picture of how the market prices different horizons, not a direct forecast of the spot-price path that will actually occur.
A curve is more than contango or backwardation
When deferred contracts are progressively above nearer contracts, the curve or a segment of it is commonly described as contango; when nearer contracts are above deferred contracts, it is commonly described as backwardation. Those labels describe slope, not the full architecture of the term structure. A curve can be flat, humped, kinked, strongly seasonal, or backwardated nearby and in contango farther out. A calendar spread isolates the price relationship between two particular maturities; the term structure shows the entire strip of such relationships. Curve Slope is therefore a feature of Futures Term Structure, not a synonym for it.
The economics behind the shape depend on the market. In storable commodities, financing, storage and other carrying costs interact with inventories, physical availability and convenience yield. Seasonal production or consumption can create recurring maturity patterns, while disruptions may reprice nearby contracts more sharply than distant ones. Outside physical commodities, the relevant drivers are asset-specific. Short-rate futures, for example, can reflect expectations about future reference rates together with risk premia, so their term structure should not be read as a pure expectations path.
The plotted points may not all be formed the same way
Curve analysis is also a data-construction problem. In some markets, deferred official settlements can be implied from calendar-spread trades or quotes rather than from outright trades in every contract month. A curve built from a consistent set of official settlements can therefore differ from one assembled from the latest available trade in each maturity, especially where outright trading is sparse. An apparent kink may reflect genuine economics, settlement methodology, stale or asynchronous prices, or some combination.
Futures term structure is useful for relative-value and calendar-spread analysis, hedging economics, roll conditions and, in physical commodities, evidence consistent with changing inventory tightness or carrying incentives. Its shape can contain forward-looking information, but no single slope uniquely identifies its cause or future price direction. The practical task is to separate the observed cross-maturity prices from the economic story—and from the data-construction choices—used to interpret them.