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yieldcrv • today at 1:26 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

The warring parties greatly influence the price of oil futures but they are not the only influences, and there are other markets

The losses of market participants and the gains from insiders is difficult for me to take seriously as a problem in commodities market

I read all of the cases in the article

Replies

trollbridge • today at 1:41 PM

The article displays a laughably out of date view of futures markets, too

  There are people and institutions, such as oil producers, who will need to sell oil at a future date. They want to lock in the price today on those future sales. There are also people and institutions, such as airlines, who have a future need for oil and would like to lock in the price today.
Airlines haven’t hedged fuel in a long time and generally run a policy now of just adjusting fares whenever fuel prices change.

Oil producers sell futures simply to ensure deliver of their oil at a certain date so that someone actually shows up to pick it up.

The rest of the market is speculation, and in particular short term movements have always been very speculative and also believed to be plagued by insider trading. Airlines and oil producers do not care about minute to minute changes.

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