Sorry to miss it, but how does this answer my question?
I asked why they weren't prepared on Friday. Storage has been expensive and getting more expensive for weeks. We've been in a massive contango for weeks. Why weren't they prepared on Friday for physical delivery?
Most oil traders don’t actually want physical delivery. They are just trying to profit off price movements. Traders have moved on to June contracts already. There’s no volume on May contracts at this point. No one wants to actually pay for physical delivery so the price is tanking since there are no bids as we get closer to expiration tomorrow.
So does this mean that without bids there are potentially many traders, not refiners or tank farms, holding those contracts still? That those traders will get stuck with taking delivery because they couldn't unload their contracts?
People with just a paper office, used to deal in numbers rather than anything physical, and with no place to store physical goods, will now have to figure out where and how to store lots of oil?
Having worked in the finance industry my entire career, most (responsible) firms have means for dealing with taking physical delivery. Less responsible firms, not so much and may be royally screwed if they have to take delivery. I've heard anecdotally of a firm that had to take physical delivery of a shipment of coal. They didn't have plans in place, but because they had an address on a river, the coal arrived via barge. No, I don't recall the name of the firm, and yes, it's just an anecdote/hearsay.
I'm going to try and translate the simplest concept that tempsy is saying.
The sellers were looking to sell for most of last week, however there fewer buyers as the contract approached its end, and those who were willing to buy wanted a lower price:
Volume of transactions on Friday was 344k, Thursday was 111m, Wednesday was 147m. In the past 30 days, the low was 686k (ex Friday), and the high was 459m. Traders slowed their buying so the market became one sided.
That still doesn't answer: why wasn't it anticipated and reflected in earlier pricing (even if volume-weighted it would be a much smaller drop, it still seems to have been missed even from futures options)?
If you have the answer to the question you are asking, you should change careers into oil contract trading; you'll probably make a bundle.
In short, the reason nobody anticipated it is because the future is unknown. The reason any market is unpredictable is because there are too many variables to account for.
I think he's asking why the market didn't have a better estimate of storage capacity and utilization and what changed in the estimate from yesterday to today.
I think that has to do with how people sometimes do analysis for trading. There's fundamental analysis, which looks at exactly that when attempting to determine the price to bid for a security, but then there's the bubblier "technical analysis" which really just looks at historical and current trends and attempts to divine whether buying now means you might be able to sell in the future.
I'd imagine people just assumed perfect liquidity here, and that they'd be able to sell even "at a small loss which is better than nothing," not realizing that nothing or negative (i.e. you're gonna pay somebody to take this oil off your hands or build your own tanks) is a valid outcome.
I'm going to take a stab at a possible reason the "market" didn't see this coming: Everyone expected the US to top off its strategic reserves, which so far hasn't really been happening. Now that You could be paid like $37 (west Texas crude closed at -$37.63) dollars/barrel, maybe the US will reconsider. I certainly wish I could store a few thousand barrels...
US companies don't want to stop producing oil. Couple that with the Russia/Saudi Arabia skuffle going on over oil prices, I'm not surprised. What surprises me is the absolutely rapid/rabid decline in the price. It just seems like pure insanity to me...
> Now that You could be paid like $37 (west Texas crude closed at -$37.63) dollars/barrel, maybe the US will reconsider.
Indeed, it looks like the US is reconsidering:
President Donald Trump said Monday the U.S. is "looking to" add as many as 75 million barrels of oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Trump spoke after an historic day in the oil CL.1, +103.61% markets, in which the May WTI crude contract closed at -$37.63 a barrel, a one-day drop of 306%. Trump said he was considering the move "based on the record low price of oil," and that the action would "top it out." Speaking at a White House press briefing, Trump said, "we'd get it for the right price."
Based on a vague memory from years ago - so I could be totally wrong here - you're assuming knowledge he doesn't have.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but: The people doing the trading are middlemen, and have no capacity period. They expected to be able to sell it all off to the energy companies, even at a loss, so they normally don't accept any physical product. But the energy companies ran out of capacity - something the middlemen (traders) don't have direct knowledge of - so got caught unexpected with contracts they can't sell, and now have to accept the physical product.
> That still doesn't answer: why wasn't it anticipated and reflected in earlier pricing
Because despite the people that like saying all future events are reflected in current prices, the fact is humans, both individually and aggregated into markets, are imperfectly prescient, thus future events are basically never perfectly priced in to to current market prices.
People say things to the effect of “if it is going to happen, it is already priced in” all the time, on HN even.
> All KNOWN future events are priced in.
There are no such thing as known future events. Market participants estimation of the likelihood of future events, weighted by inclination and capacity to invest, are priced in.
The answer is, literally anyone with cash could sign up today and have an oil contract tomorrow. It is extremely easy to take part in oil contracts trading and those people who basically just have an office can't actually keep the contracts now and must unload. Contrary to what people think, you don't have to be an expert or have any special knowledge to trade physical contracts.
It might go negative - no, just has, as I write - if you were bag holding on Friday you might carry on in the hope of some recovery, but you don't want physical delivery so you were always going to sell today no matter what; closer it gets to expiry, or to $0, the more push has come to shove and you're finally closing your position.
Most traders don't have any oil to sell. What is left are those who have storage space making a deal on the traders too stupid to get out already. This isn't many, but since there is no demand those with storage space can offer very low prices and get the rest of them.
-$37.00 is a distress price, just for the unwitting investors who agreed to play “Hot Potato: Bloodsport.”
By definition, you’re looking at the price for people who wouldn’t want to play, if they could avoid playing. They are literally over a barrel. If they don’t get out, the broker gets to screw them even worse at the deadline.
Volume was up, because some people were going through heroics to close their position at all costs.
But the end of day price is for those who got screwed: the truly unaware who didn’t realize they were out of time, or didn’t think about it going past $0. It’s probably relatively few people, despite today’s volume. When you lose control, someone agrees for you that you’ll pay $37/bb to get out.
It's only a paper loss until you sell. Everybody was hoping and praying things would change and now that it's abundantly clear that it's not changing, they're desperately trying to unwind their positions.
Not really. If you hold contracts at expiration (May expires tomorrow) then you are forced to take physical delivery of oil. No one wants oil right now, and if you take physical delivery you’re going to have to pay big premiums to store oil at Cushing. The discount reflects the premium storage costs.
Most oil traders just want to profit off price movements and not actually own physical oil. There’s no volume on May contracts now they’ve all moved on to June.
Chapter 200 doesn't go into much detail but chapter 7 (for metals) explains how the exchange will facilitate an independent middleman to store until arrangements are made and they will bill you for that service.
I have not been involved in chapter 200 operations but I've heard socially this occasionally happens relating to substandard product. "We agreed on light sweet crude in the contract but you tried to deliver sour tar". The exchange knows its all going to get dragged into court eventually, so they try to be fair and transparent and well documented. There are plenty of people renting tank space as a normal business operation.
I don't think you're going to get Force Majeure protection. That's for something neutral to all parties like a hurricane, not one side of the contract didn't feel like closing out and doesn't have tank space lined up.
My understanding is you still take delivery. It might be in the form of a fleet of tankers or barges arriving at your office. But, you will take delivery, whether you like it or not. Any responsible trading firm that deals in futures should have mechanisms in place to deal with physical delivery.
They have been trying to sell, but none was buying. The closer you get to the expiration date, the lower you are willing to go to sell. Since contracts expire tomorrow, traders are willing to go all the way to avoid getting physical delivery.
Yes, it was predicted successfully (by everyone who is no longer holding a contract). It was also not predicted successfully (by everyone paying through the nose so they won't have to find a place to stash some barrels of a volatile compound).
How far do you want to take that argument? If successfully predicting it would mean that prices dropped to zero on Friday then shouldn't that have also been successfully predicted and impacted the price on Thursday? What about Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday?
I asked why they weren't prepared on Friday. Storage has been expensive and getting more expensive for weeks. We've been in a massive contango for weeks. Why weren't they prepared on Friday for physical delivery?