Quote from dom993:
You might not be new to trading, but it certainly sounds like you are new to algo trading.
The answer is "merge backadjusted".
I hear you and I am familiar with continous contracts. I havent a clue how they would adjust a contango or backwardation on an intraday database that would have relativity for this. Any gaps that would exist between contracts would be errors that could triiger trades and render results useless.
Applying the systems to multiple historical individual contract databases would yield correct trades and results and allow correct evaluation. I presented it applied to 8 different contracts above. The only problem is that some of those time periods overlap so even though it is a different contract it isnt really representing totally different market dynamics as contracts from prior years would.
I appreciate the comments.