371–380 of 546 posts
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I'd love to hear from someone that got stuck with the 1000 bushels of corn (or similar). What do you do? How in the world do you manage that?
There's a great Planet Money story on the Onion King. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/09/19/649273647/epis...
“ 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…
They could always just burn the oil.
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How to prepare: Sell futures on Friday, buy today (to close out the position). Profit from the predictable price difference.
Was it predictable tho?
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How to prepare: Sell futures on Friday, buy today (to close out the position). Profit from the predictable price difference.
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.
(Short-) sell last Friday, buy today at about 0 to close the position.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719949 This is a big deal. I think EURN might hit 40% divyield which would be nuts. I'm a gambling lunatic, this is not investment advice. Floating storage thesis.
If Tankers are $150K+ vs. usual $20-40K for any prolonged period of time...
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Now trading at -$37.00. That's right. Negative thirty seven dollars. Today: -54.67, -299.23%. https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/crude%20oil%20-...
I wonder if that negative int broke a bunch of code in software around the world
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CL=F?p=CL=F
Look at the red block below the graph, where it should have gone negative.
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WTI was at -36.25$ just now. I hope you didn't put your money where your mouth is.
>Usually by the time you see commodities activity hitting the front page of HN the bets are in... My bet was already in...however, I do think once we start seeing the news like this proliferate we will see an odd swing by Wednesday or Friday. Still my question was sincere, if we see a swing, I don't know what the markets rationale would be...that said where can it go from negative but up
But yeah it seems like a short-term storage problem and it should bounce back, if your bet was something else it may yet pay off.
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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.
Futures contracts are daily settled. So the difference between starting price and ending price has to be paid at end-of-day settlement.
Prices didn't crash until this morning. Nobody was taking much of a loss before then.
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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…
Nice to imagine, but the speed of light is too slow for a lot of low latency applications. After you allow the infrastructure some latency. A dedicated line might work, but without the network that is expensive.
Is it? Looking around, it seems average visual reaction times (VRTs) are on the order of 250 ms, and even the fastest VRTs are well over 100 ms. A study looking specifically at medical students for auditory and visual reaction times ("A comparative study of visual and auditory reaction times on the basis of gender and physical activity levels of medical first year students" [1]) also seems to support those numbers in the medical context, and while experienced surgeons could be expected to be somewhat faster that paper also links to research indicating hard biological minimums:
>"Researches by Kemp show that an auditory stimulus takes only 8–10 ms to reach the brain, but on the other hand, a visual stimulus takes 20-40 ms."
If we want to be quite conservative and aim to keep latency to single digit ms, so sub-10ms, then the speed of light in standard fiber gives us an RTT limit of around 1300 miles. Going more conservative and assuming actual route having to essentially follow the legs of a right triangle, that still gives a radius of around 460 miles, with a set of reasonably conservative assumptions. That seems plenty good enough to cover an enormous amount of work-from-home (or at least work-from-different-location) when it comes to actual existing medical practices, where I doubt most doctors at hospitals live >460 miles away.
I would agree that there are real issues with the idea, but more in terms of the risks events like network disruptions than the speed of light.
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Was it predictable tho?
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).