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Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

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421–430 of 546 posts

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#421
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea how much it takes to store oil in Cushing during normal times ?

This article from March 25 states that rates at Cushing more than doubled from 20 cents per barrel per month to 50 cents since February. https://www.reuters.com/article/global-oil-storage/global-oi...

If storage rate is cents per barrel and barrels cost negative dollars per barrel, is sounds like storage is still very affordable.

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this comes to pass, I'm all for it. If we could take the demand we saw for oil, and put it into demand for high-speed Internet, we could see completely new, blue ocean markets. Imagine a surgeon being able to control a robotic surgery tool from the comforts of his/her home, where you have to have extremely low-latency or guaranteed low-latency networks. Or imagine mecheng offices running simulation jobs in the clo…

> mecheng offices running simulation jobs in the cloud or an on-premises instead of each having a workstation, and being able to cluster that compute together that's totally a thing. worked on low-latency, high resolution remoting software for this purpose exactly. Buy a bunch of beefy servers and have scientists remote in from a laptop to run graphic intensive simulations, rather than buy a workstation for everyone.

I never understood why as a company you wouldn't prefer an on-premises computer cluster with some overhead and give employees thin clients, rather than give everybody MacBook Pros. Thin clients + servers make much more sense to me from a business perspective. They seem much easier to secure (just revoke some keys if you need to fire somebody), much easier to give everybody a reproducible dev env and avoid a lot of shenanigans, and saves money.

I wonder how much this costs: https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't even know if I can fathom how you could get permitted to build such a tank in a couple of weeks, but the answer to why that isn't happening _right now_ is probably because nobody wants to lay out a bunch of capital for a business that might do well contemporaneously but that has no future. Either things settle back down to normal at some point, in which case you've made some revenue, but probably not…

7 million barrels * $30 a barrel = 210 million just to take the oil. Plus $20 a barrel when you sell it brings you to $350,000,000 in revenue on a 7 million barrel tank. What am I missing, other than not being able to build the tank fast enough?

I mean, if you have a spare $300 million lying around, that sounds like a fantastic arbitrage opportunity, and (napkin math time) if you're holding the barrels for more than 10 months, that'd be the way to do it.

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#424
post #407
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes

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?

No. Their prime brokers will force them to sell it at the low (negative) price.

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#425
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this almost happened to me once when I was trading futures. My broker called me several times throughout the day and I couldn't take the call. When I finally did, he told me to roll my contract forward that day otherwise I would have to take delivery of 1000 bushels of corn.

My grandfather in Colorado did the opposite once in the 1970s. He needed some cattle, so he bought a small quantity of cattle futures of some form (I was too young when I heard the story to remember the details) from a broker/commodity trader in Chicago. When the contract approached the settlement date, the broker called to ask him to sell. Trouble was, my grandfather just wanted cows, not cash. The broker was frustr…

I don't know. Somebody has to take delivery of the cattle, so why not the guy who wants some cattle?

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I don't understand is why the sudden move today? Did the longs think they had a place to put the oil on Friday but found out over the weekend they had no place to put it? Just seems like you would know what to do with the oil on Friday. Note this is not a rhetorical question, I would sincerely like an answer. Guys like myself, an ex fund manager, could be tourists in the oil market. I know I was, speculating o…

A really risky (but I think worth the risk) bet is to buy the front and sell the back. You will receive a huge credit, and as long as you close out the back leg below what you sold for, you’re in the clear.

This isn't possible, except for people who can deal with the physical logistics. If you buy the front, you need to put the stuff somewhere for a month.

Chances are the people who got stuck selling at negative prices were actually doing just what you describe, they just weren't planning on the spread blowing out from physical issues.

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A really risky (but I think worth the risk) bet is to buy the front and sell the back. You will receive a huge credit, and as long as you close out the back leg below what you sold for, you’re in the clear.

This isn't possible, except for people who can deal with the physical logistics. If you buy the front, you need to put the stuff somewhere for a month. Chances are the people who got stuck selling at negative prices were actually doing just what you describe, they just weren't planning on the spread blowing out from physical issues.

I don’t see supercontango lasting forever. At some point oil demand will rise. Even if it’s a small rise.

And you typically should close out combination orders well before expiration.

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#428
post #372

“ The upcoming May contract’s expiry means traders are shifting their positions to June as they try to avoid taking deliveries of cargoes because of the lack of space to store them. That has opened up an unprecedented discount of more than $10 between the two nearest contracts. This situation—in which the price of the June contract is far above that of the May one—apparently delights in the name “super contango.” Peo…

> In ordinary economics, things do not have negative prices: If nobody wants a thing, if you’d have to pay them to take the thing, you just don’t make it. Oil is a little weird—it is hard to shut in and then restart an oil well They could always just burn the oil.

How would they do that? Power plants and generators need a load, cars and other transport needs somewhere to go and something to carry, and other infrastructure to burn fuel at any sort of scale just doesn't really exist except at the wells themselves. Flaring infrastructure was designed to burn large amounts of unprofitable gasses coming up with the oil and to prevent dangerous pressure build up, not waste tons of unrefined petroleum. Beyond the added pollution it's a huge safety risk that could destroy a bunch of wells.

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#429
post #407
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes

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?

They already know how to store lots of oil. They can and do rent supertankers for example.

Re: Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending

#430

What happens when Saudi Arabia collapses? Does the royalty get the fuck out of town on their private jets with as many gold bars as they can carry?

Whatever hippy commune, theocracy, or warlord will arise to replace it, they will still keep pumping every drop of oil that they can out of the ground.

In that sense, it doesn't matter one bit what the House of Saud does, the machine they built will keep going long after its gone.

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