Quote from coolweb: When you roll over In Interactive broker, a window will pop up (right after or before the end of the contract 1 or 2 days) and ask you "Do you want to roll over these contracts ..." You just checkbox them and its rolled over, No rolling manually, or redirecting the 20 ton natural gas truck that arrived at your front door back to cme. This is NOT TRUE. A week before first notice date, TWS asks you if you want to add new market data tickers for the next front month, and optionally remove the old tickers. THIS DOES NOTHING TO YOUR POSITIONS, which must be offset (i.e. selling/buying them back) or they will be: - cash-settled at expiration (if they are cash-settled contracts); or - will turn into currency positions (if they are physically settled currency contracts that are eligible for delivery at IB); or - will be auto-liquidated some number of hours/days before they cease trading (for other physically-settled contracts that are not eligible for physical delivery at IB). Please read http://www.interactivebrokers.com/e...calDeliveryLiquidationRules.php?ib_entity=llc and everything else about futures on the IB site.
Mini contracts in natural gas settle financially so there's no worry about having to withdraw any gas from the Henry Hub at the first of the month. As far as rollover gaps, they can somtimes be substantial in natural gas, easily $0.10 or $0.15. The rollover between fall and winter months can be insane, as in over $1.00, but you'll have forewarning of such an event, as the spread usually exists for a while in the big contract strip.
It seems that there's some fundamental misunderstanding about what's represented in the pricing curve. There's really some pretty good fundamental education (and even some more advanced stuff) on the NYMEX/CBOT/CME sites.