What this is
Backwardated is a commodities terminal. It puts the prices that matter on one screen: energy, metals, agriculture, FX, rates, equity indices, crypto. Around the prices it puts the things that explain them. Futures curves so you can see what the market expects, not just where it is today. Spreads like the 3-2-1 crack and the soybean crush, because desks trade relationships, not single numbers. CFTC positioning data. A calendar counting down to the releases that move these markets. News, filtered hard, so a press release about a theme park can't masquerade as a reason gasoline fell.
All of that is free, and most of it needs no account. Paper trading needs a free account, only so your book stays yours.
The subscription
The paid plan costs $5 per month and unlocks the AI layer: a morning desk brief written from the live board, correlation analysis on any group of instruments you select, one-click explanations of how a headline could move a price, and AI Analyze, which lets you drag across any stretch of a chart and ask what happened there.
Billing runs through Stripe. You can cancel any time from the billing portal in Settings, and cancelling does what you'd hope: you keep full access until the end of the period you already paid for, and it simply doesn't renew. No partial locking, no dark patterns. If a charge ever looks wrong, email support@backwardated.com and I'll sort it out.
Why I built it
I'm Sohan Chakravorty. I made this site because I kept hitting the same wall: finding the price of oil takes five seconds, and finding out why it moved can take an hour of tab-hopping, and even then you're mostly guessing.
The tools that answer the second question properly cost more per month than most people's rent. Everything free hands you a chart and wishes you luck. There wasn't much in between, so I built the in-between: one screen where the movement and the reason for the movement sit next to each other. The curve tells you what the market believes. The positioning data tells you who's crowded. The news engine tells you what happened, and is honest enough to say when nothing did, because sometimes a price cliff is just a futures contract rolling over, and a tool that invents a story for it is worse than no tool at all.
The name comes from backwardation, the state where near-term futures cost more than distant ones. It usually means the market wants the thing now. That felt about right.
The fine print
Quotes are delayed, typically ten to fifteen minutes for futures. This is a research and learning tool, not an execution platform, and nothing on it is investment advice. Paper trading uses simulated money. The AI features generate analysis from market data and headlines; they can be wrong, and you should treat them as a starting point for your own thinking, not a substitute for it.
Backwardated · operated by Sohan Chakravorty · support@backwardated.com