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Ask HN: Negative oil futures from last week. Did people take possession?

1 points by throwaway158497 ↗ HN
There was big news last week that Oil futures for May were negative. So, what happened to all the oil after that? Did people take possession of it? Did the suppliers stop producing more oil?

I have seen that oil containers are lined up outside Los Angeles but have no more insight into it. Will June production be less?

2 comments

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nabla9
If I understand it correctly, the oil traded in those futures was already on it's way to Cushing, Oklahoma when the price became negative.

What it meant was that future sellers had to pay for buyers to accept those futures. There was enough capacity to take that oil.

raincom
Most of the oil traders are neither producers nor consumers (airlines, gas-powered electric utilities, etc). A few of these traders have experience in taking possession. Whoever doesn't have experience in that will just pay premium (that is, negative prices) to rid of their contracts.

June 2020 futures have been trading since 2018. Small oil producers, unlike Saudi and Russia, hedge their oil by selling calls or buying puts or a combination of them.

Where does this end? Just transfer that negative premium to oil producers to NOT send the oil. However, this won't happen, as negative prices tend to happen on the last two days of the front month. Unless we see negative for July futures right now (in April), oil producers just follow their contracts.