alt.hn

4/22/2025 at 12:58:43 PM

I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil (2015)

 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/that-time-i-tried-to-buy-some-crude-oil

by niklasbuschmann

4/22/2025 at 9:01:50 PM

Planet Money had a wonderful series of episodes where they did exactly this a few years ago.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...

They traced the path of their barrel from purchase, to production, to refining, to the sale of the various hydrocarbon products.

It's a great listen.

by timoth3y

4/24/2025 at 7:13:27 AM

Did they pay extra for the barrel itself? Surely that steel doesn't come for free.

by sgt

4/24/2025 at 11:05:06 AM

You can sell the barrel after you are done

by DrFalkyn

4/24/2025 at 1:39:28 PM

Is there a market for barrels? - I would assume most oil is stored in tanks, transported via pipeline to harbor, loaded onto tanker and oil trucks with never seeing a barrel and the barrel mostly serving as a unit for calculation.

by johannes1234321

4/24/2025 at 2:19:01 PM

Im in Texas, lots of oil, and have seen market for such barrels when shopping for shipping containers and IBC totes in the past. Usually I find sellers of these things near distribution hubs.

The barrels never had been used for crude oil when I’ve inquired. Sometimes a refined oil product likely used as a raw material for a manufacturing process, but never crude. I think it’s never transported in such small quantities to make sense of using actual barrels. It’s more so a unit of measure, probably with some valid historical context.

My understanding is it’s most likely transported from a well via a pipeline and may need a short trip in a truck or train (tanker style) to get to the pipeline from the well. The well itself usually has a collection reservoir to allow for 24/7 extraction.

I don’t know exactly I’ve just been vaguely around oil industry and engineers my whole life due to where I live.

by conductr

4/24/2025 at 3:28:11 PM

Hello, my family has property with nat gas and some oil wells on it, and I've been out in the field with relatives that work in the industry.

In small fields they'll typically have larger tanks from the 1,000 to 10,000 gallon size. Wells typically also produce some water and small amounts of nat gas so they'll have some way to either store or burn the gas, and they'll either separate the water on site for disposal, or have a mixed oil/water product that is seperated at a later stage.

If the node isn't on a pipeline a vacuum/pump truck will show up either when the alerting systems hit a particular level, or when a particular interval of time has passed to ensure the equipment is still working.

Modern bulk pump trucks are simply the fastest way to move the product. No one in it for profit is going to move the unrefined product in amounts that small. It's not valuable enough.

by pixl97

4/24/2025 at 6:44:21 PM

How long ago was it that it was shipped in barrels? At some point it must have been, but the lore of oil history is not something I'm familiar with.

by fragmede

4/24/2025 at 7:22:01 PM

Went down the Google rabbit hole, this article is the best summary I found (in 3 minutes of reading). Basically, wood barrels were first used as that’s just what existed from wine. It didn’t hold up so the iconic 55 gallon steel barrel was invented. The industry outgrew it and could save a lot on shipping/handling if they developed pipelines and tankers. Each of these transition took a few decades, but also pretty much follow the industrial advancements that occurred from the 1850s to the 1950s.

https://www.skolnik.com/blog/oils-long-history-with-the-55-g...

by conductr

4/24/2025 at 9:38:18 PM

Good find! So I'd need to set my time machine to 1949 in order tknve able to bring back an actual 55 gallon drum of oil. Hope I don't mess up the timeline with my souvenir!

by fragmede

4/25/2025 at 1:20:45 PM

Enjoy your steel-drum calypso music while you barbecue on your steel-drum smoker.

by mapt

4/25/2025 at 9:44:52 AM

More like 1859 :)

https://aoghs.org/transportation/history-of-the-42-gallon-oi...

A BBL is not just a standard quantity equal to 42 US gallons.

It's 42 US gallons @ 60 DEG F.

Now when they discovered oil in western Pennsylvania, one day there were farmers, the next day they were rich farmers.

They might not have had the highest education, but they didn't like getting ripped off. What was sought was precise 42 gallon liquid-tight wooden casks. So it could be assured if the barrel was within a couple inches of full, it contained a good 42 gallons.

When the oil made its way to a major port, there would be a large change of custody, and the buyers would want to be sure it was all there according to the documents.

This is when the cargo surveyors would inventory the barrels as they were being loaded on to the ships, plus check for fullness by opening the cork and sticking in their thumb. The replaced corks were often then sealed with wax identifying the inspector.

In the oilfield and the port this is how a very trusted barrel-maker ended up becoming a surveyor.

Plus it was somewhat recognized that liquids expand with heat and shrink with cold. With oil, different oils respond to temperature to different degrees.

This was well-established scientifically for generations with vegetable oils and whale oils, but was something new for petroleum companies to grasp.

In the laboratory, the surveyors made independent precise tables to correct oils for temperature, this was really essential after many barrels were emptied into a large storage tank, like they were long using for things like molasses or whale oil. The tank temperature is measured, and corrections are made to determine the billable quantity of BBL there would be if it was actually 60 DEG F.

And so it started out with surveyors having technology quite a bit beyond what oil companies had. (The unspoken thing is that the surveyor has to be trustworthy more so than the oil company.)

Well, I have always refused to relent :)

With numerous gifted engineers and now even an abundance of PhD's, the majors with their resources have been unlimited for quite some time before I was born, compared to my labs being minuscule by comparison.

So what. A significant part of my life's work is carrying on the technology advantage that I directly inherited from that 19th century origin anyway. I just could never settle for what many oil companies settle for using the latest instrumentation & techniques over the decades. Chemicals too, with way more byzantine technology needs, but they're mostly billed by weight, not volume. Plenty of room for improvement across the board.

I guess I'm an energy guy, but have always been interested in solar more than oil, too bad there was no way that would pay the bills during the Reagan Recession, so I joined a hundred-year-old company when the startup research lab I was helping build ended up imploding. There was also one notable ex-plosion too, which happened seconds after I was there taking a reading, and it was an engineering defect. Since I was almost a victim I had to overengineer the weaknesses that the actual engineers had failed at. You get used to it after a while.

People are just not careful enough, whether it's equations or toxins :\

by fuzzfactor

4/25/2025 at 12:28:37 AM

It's shipped in tanker trucks, rail cars and tankser ships, it's measured in millions of barrels.

by ForOldHack

4/25/2025 at 12:25:54 AM

In Texas, you clean them out and make smokers. Oak barrels are worth 10x.

by ForOldHack

4/24/2025 at 3:47:04 PM

As conductr says, barrels are still commonly used for refined oil products. I worked at a gas station as a teenager, and we sold barrels of oil to farmers. They worked on a deposit system, we'd buy back the barrels. Or more commonly the farmer brought back the empty when buying a new barrel so didn't get charged the deposit.

by bryanlarsen

4/24/2025 at 1:48:25 PM

I have one for making into a little stove with a kit from Amazon and lots of people use metal barrels for burning trash in rural areas. They are super cheap though like $10.

by Mistletoe

4/24/2025 at 2:25:41 PM

There is.

https://www.purepac.co.uk/shop/category/drums/plastic-and-st...

by tokai

4/24/2025 at 2:38:32 PM

Those are 200L, a "barrel" as a unit for crude oil is ca. 159 liter.

Now for some use that may be fine, but that also requires proper cleaning (following environment proection rules etc)

My question was more like a cycle. The metal itself certainly got some value as well.

by johannes1234321

4/25/2025 at 2:30:49 AM

Would a metal recycler accept it?

by greenavocado

4/24/2025 at 6:58:12 PM

I live in Texas like another reply and those barrels are all over the place. They get used for everything from trash bins to bbqs. Also, old drill pipe is used for 99% of the pipe fences you see on farms/ranches.

by chasd00

4/24/2025 at 5:41:41 PM

Barrel is a unit of measure, like gallon.

by engineer_22

4/24/2025 at 5:48:43 PM

I know that. But if you show up to an oil field and buy a barrel of oil, they're not going to give it to you in plastic bags.

by sgt

4/24/2025 at 6:23:39 PM

Maybe they could use a plastic bag surrounded by a cardboard box, like the bulk cat litter at Menards.

by p1mrx

4/24/2025 at 5:58:14 PM

They could tho? thinking face

by nielsbot

4/24/2025 at 7:47:26 PM

Could petrol break down the plastic?

by butlike

4/24/2025 at 7:56:34 PM

Yes, crude oil / gasoline / diesel will break down polyethylene grocery bags.

by reaperman

4/25/2025 at 3:05:45 PM

Great, biodegradable bags. You could charge more.

by sgt

4/24/2025 at 6:50:31 PM

Imagine the plastic waste and pollution! I think they should maybe consider hemp? That's an environmentally friendly option and it'll make a tremendous difference. /s

by sgt

4/25/2025 at 10:19:28 AM

Selling you a single barrel of oil on a once off basis is _almost_ as absurd as expecting delivery in plastic bags.

by Macha

4/25/2025 at 1:25:23 PM

Unless you're in Canada, where they sell everything in plastic bags, and a barrel of oil is a solid chunk of rock at room temperature.

by mapt

4/24/2025 at 9:59:32 AM

Didn't the price of the actual barrel became more onerous than the product itself during covid?

by pelagicAustral

4/24/2025 at 6:02:05 PM

My understanding from some of these articles is that oil isn't literally transported in barrels the vast majority of the time, it's in tanker trucks/rail cars/ships moving from source to refinery to retail the whole way. Part of what makes it fun to "buy a barrel of oil" is that you can't go many places and ask for a barrel, you need to bring the thing to put it in (like a tanker truck or rail car).

by duped

4/24/2025 at 11:25:08 AM

This is common for a huge number of products, ranging from cosmetics, consumables, pharmaceuticals, bottled water, etc.

by Swoerd123

4/24/2025 at 12:54:25 PM

For carbon footprint also, I believe. For bottled water at least, manufacturing the bottle has by far the most environmental impact, even more so than the shipping/transportation part of the process (which you'd think would be severe, as water is heavy).

by HPsquared

4/24/2025 at 3:58:13 PM

That's an interesting tidbit. Every time there is a suggestion we switch to reusable glass bottles instead of plastic, someone raises the issue of the extra weight of the bottle which will lead to greater carbon emissions during transport.

But if, as you say the largest emission comes from manufacturing the plastic bottle, not the transport of the bottle AND the content; then it seems possible to lower the carbon footprint by switching to glass (on top of the other advantages like reducing landfill use/litterring/environmental pollution).

by thmsths

4/25/2025 at 12:21:35 PM

Maybe both making a glass and plastic bottle take more energy to make then in transport? And or you have to transport the empties back to clean and refill?

by vanattab

4/25/2025 at 1:26:56 PM

Cleaning will use almost as much water and much more energy than filling it. In industrial settings you must be REALLY sure that the bottle is clean, so a lot of hot water.

by yetihehe

4/24/2025 at 4:18:24 PM

>someone raises the issue of the extra weight of the bottle which will lead to greater carbon emissions during transport

Lmao, that's on the order of 1-2%.

by moralestapia

4/24/2025 at 12:04:49 PM

in one market oil prices even went negative so presumably, yeah.

by pydry

4/24/2025 at 6:49:54 PM

I tried to buy a foot of yarn but no one offered it packaged in feet

by justlikereddit

4/25/2025 at 12:38:58 PM

Makes me sad hearing this. Planet Money fell off so hard in the years after this

by qoez

4/25/2025 at 1:45:43 PM

I buy ~200,000 physical barrels of oil for 2 refineries every single day. The quantity is mind blowing and Im not even a particularly large oil trader in the grand scheme of things. The world drinks ~104 million barrels per day or around 1200 barrels a second. An olympic swimming pool holds ~15000 barrels of volume. In Canada, we trade in "cubes" which are M3. Each M3 is ~6.29287 barrels of oil. I do my monthly planning in km3.

I'm happy to answer any industry questions in case anyone has any. It is a fascinating job.

by hodder

4/25/2025 at 3:05:00 PM

I find it nearly incomprehensible that so much oil exists. That's ~7k Olympic swimming pools of oil every day. This has been going on for decades.

by x187463

4/25/2025 at 4:14:27 PM

It still blows my mind to this day. Every time I "purchase" a ship full of crude it blows my mind the level of infrastructure to make it happen. Maybe I'll load an Aframax full of 500kbbl or issue my crude buy plan in km3. I always try and look up the ships and track the vessel movements and sea conditions bc there are teams of people on those ships working them. Meanwhile I just picked up the phone and made it happen... with like $40m bucks. It is a wild thing that never becomes normal.

Just think about a what a km3 of oil would look like. It is nuts. then realize that we buy and sell in 10,000m3 pipe batches with plenty of liquidity.

by hodder

4/25/2025 at 10:29:47 PM

Do you actually buy them on the spot market or buy them as futures?

by OptionOfT

4/25/2025 at 1:57:26 PM

How do you take delivery of such huge volumes? Rail?

by treyd

4/25/2025 at 2:49:38 PM

Surely by pipeline or ship I think. When he says "physical barrels of oil" I believe he means he's actually buying the oil itself (as opposed to buying a contract or derivative of some sort). I don't think he means that the crude oil is actually arriving in individual barrels. But I could be wrong.

by cman1444

4/25/2025 at 4:04:32 PM

Correct.

by hodder

4/25/2025 at 4:04:16 PM

Pipeline and ship. We've done some rail in the past, but it is a last resort when basis spreads are wide.

The oil is pumped off of ships or straight off the pipeline into our refinery tankage.

by hodder

4/25/2025 at 2:05:11 PM

Do refineries employ people like you directly? Or do you work for a downstream supplier of some kind? Curious what the supply chain looks like.

by cj

4/25/2025 at 4:05:24 PM

Yeah I work for a large oil company. Companies like BP, Shell, Marathon, Valero etc all have oil traders/marketers doing refinery supply. There are also intermediaries like traders at midstream companies, producers (selling the oil), or trading shops like Trafigura, Glencore, Mercuria who are slowly accruing more physical assets. Some hedge funds operate in the phys space as well.

by hodder

4/25/2025 at 6:17:33 PM

is a km3 1000 m3 or 1,000,000,000 m3?

by shalmanese

4/25/2025 at 10:24:52 PM

to go from km to m you multiply by 1,000.

to go from km^2 to m^2 you multiply by 1,000^2.

to go from km^3 to m^3 you multiply by 1,000^3.

So 1km^3 is 1,000,000,000m^3

by OptionOfT

4/25/2025 at 8:09:08 PM

[dead]

by canadianfella

4/22/2025 at 5:25:49 PM

This is right up there with the futures trader who accidentally ordered a barge full of coal delivered to his manhattan office.

by ahazred8ta

4/24/2025 at 6:39:37 AM

Yes many futures are not "cash settled" but settled in the actual commodity.

This is why in rare occasions the price of a thing goes negative because trading in that thing you are contractually obligated to take delivery and people trying to unload that obligation sometimes can't find buyers until they are paid to take delivery. It happens when nobody really wants to buy a thing and there is no capacity left to store or ship. When you buy a futures contract and you don't want delivery you have to sell it to close your position, and rarely you have to give people large sums of money so you can close.

by colechristensen

4/24/2025 at 9:07:30 AM

In 2020 some Oil futures were negative at close, which has one obvious effect (if you're stuck holding the bag you're paying to store all this oil despite it being, at least temporarily, worthless) but also messes up the ETFs.

Suppose my actual oil futures go from $800k to $900k, the ideal ETF is trying to ensure that $800k also turns into $900k just as if its investors were in actual oil futures. But these aren't futures and don't result in delivery - so critically when real oil futures blow up and that $900k turns into -$1M because the global economy had a heart attack the ETF cannot be worth -$1M as it's just paper and I don't have to pay you one cent.

For the ETFs this means a negative exposure for the operator - they're eating unlimited downside but can't pass that on to their customers, and for a blip like 2020 that's survivable (if you're well capitalised) but longer term it would be fatal.

by tialaramex

4/24/2025 at 11:45:39 AM

It's also a head-ache for options traders because some options models (black scholes) have log-normal pricing baked in which don't actually allow for the underlying asset to go negative. So nevermind worrying about taking delivery, your HFT options desk just had their algo blow up.

by LittleTimothy

4/24/2025 at 4:13:56 PM

Nah your desk closed out as the model was starting to choke.

by wbl

4/24/2025 at 4:16:59 PM

Looks like they just need to use complex numbers in their calculations?

by heavenlyblue

4/24/2025 at 9:23:49 AM

i figured these ETF providers have to have sufficient capital in reserve to allow for it perhaps? I mean, how does it work if they defaulted on those options by not being able to take delivery? Who pays?

by chii

4/24/2025 at 12:36:15 PM

Some ETFs can't go negative because they're moving say, stock in oil refiners, oil research, etc. and they've got a model to try to follow the motion of oil futures based on investments in those stocks. So for them this sort of chaos is not good of course, but they don't have scary red numbers everywhere and people who might jump out of a window.

In some cases there is basically a bucket shop (hopefully not literally, those are illegal) and so you're betting against somebody with lots of capital, but in that scenario it can definitely go very bad and it's important to read your fine print. I believe in 2020 some funds pointed out that in their fine print it said they get to choose not to follow a month's oil delivery if they need to, so, you expected $15M for the June oil because it went negative as you'd hoped, but too bad we've decided to roll that over to July oil, and that's going to lose you money as you have to wait a month longer and get worse results.

That sort of thing is obviously infuriating for an investor, but as with gambling firms who won't pay (and this happens a lot if you win serious money gambling, e.g. Oops, when you gave us $100 we forgot to ask for valid ID, but now that we owe you $150 000 because you got lucky we've remembered - without ID actually the bet was illegal, so here's the $100 back and no hard feelings) they get a reputation for not paying and that does eventually hurt them.

by tialaramex

4/24/2025 at 11:11:58 AM

> which has one obvious effect (if you're stuck holding the bag you're paying to store all this oil despite it being, at least temporarily, worthless)

Isn't it the other way around? Because you would be stuck holding the bag the prices went negative?

by detaro

4/24/2025 at 12:21:31 PM

I guess it depends how you look at it, the two things are intertwined.

by tialaramex

4/24/2025 at 9:31:07 AM

> Yes many futures are not "cash settled" but settled in the actual commodity.

This, in many ways is a ridiculous sentence which shows what is wrong with the futures market. Futures are contracts for the supply of commodities. All futures should be settled by the actual commodity! That we have got to a situation where the vast majority of futures contracts are just 2nd order bets on the price of thing rather than delivery of the thing is non optimal.

by Marazan

4/24/2025 at 10:34:22 AM

This comment shows what is wrong with people's understanding of futures markets. Commodity futures are not for the supply of commodities. If you need a supply of commodities, cash contracts are your thing.

Futures, specifically, are useful for implicitly borrowing commodities to control inventory levels across time. An airline needs continuous access to jet fuel, so to be safe, they buy more jet fuel than they need in the cash market. But they don't want to pay for owning all this jet fuel, so they simultaneously sell it off in the futures market. Thus, they have created a loan of jet fuel, making sure they have spare fuel available when they need it without outright having to own it.

In order to have a loan, one needs a speculator willing to buy the credit risk. More speculators usually leads to more liquidity and more accurate deals on loans. There's nothing wrong with this at all.

See The Economic Function of Futures Markets by Williams (1986) if you are curious.

by kqr

4/24/2025 at 12:57:59 PM

Man, it's hilarious how you managed to go full circle around the point while missing it.

If the airline wants to ensure future supply at a given prices they can simply buy futures settled in actual product.

Hedging against future volatility by agreeing on a deal "now" is the entire point. Sure, sometimes you lose when there's a price drop but the other guy won. At the end of the day everyone benefits from smoothing out the volatility.

Buying and selling cash settled futures is just how small time buyers and sellers access the market since they can't take delivery of entire train loads of goods but still need to hedge.

Finance professionals trading them around to wring out an extra percent here and there it beside the point.

by potato3732842

4/24/2025 at 2:16:05 PM

Hedging can’t be the only point, which is something we have known since the ancient Babylonians invented futures.

For every person who is trying to hedge future volatility, there has to be a person on the other side of that contract who is speculating on the possibility that the hedge guy is more frightened that they should be.

You need hedgers and speculators to have a two-way market, and in markets where you have predominantly hedgers they get completely fleeced by the few speculators brave/dumb enough to take the other side of their trades. This is because many markets are structurally unbalanced such that the people who need to hedge long (producers) and people who need to hedge short (consumers) operate on different timeframes etc. So if I’m a farmer growing some crop I might want to sell the 1yr future, but the guy trying to hedge the price for purchase (wholesale grocer or whatever) will be hedging the front future like 1m out. So someone has to carry the risk in the forward curve between 1m and 1 year or noone gets the hedge they need and the market doesn’t work.

Quite aside from that, there are all sorts of things which are cash-settled because you literally can’t do a physical settlement but people need to hedge (yes and speculate) anyway. Take an index future on an equity index. How are you going to physically settle a future on the SPX or (god forbid) the Russell? The liquidity consequences would be devastating to markets.

by seanhunter

4/24/2025 at 3:28:44 PM

That's just not the case though.

Buyers and sellers both want to hedge and they're both happy to give up some potential upside of getting one over on the other guy in exchange for stability.

As you mentioned, timeframes and volumes often don't match up perfectly. So enter the speculators. They provide a lot of the liquidity. And they get paid for it. Like they make a 1yr bet and 12 1mo counter bets and do that enough that the wins and losses smooth out and they make a few pennies on the dollar.

The futures market is basically a cyclone of financialization whipping around an eye of "actual business doing actual things" that needs to smooth out volatility (because you can't make a huge investment in a volatile market or you might get screwed into not being able to make payroll some quarter even though what you're up to is solvent any given year).

You can apply the same model to financial goods (and you often want to because the solvency of all sorts of banking activities is predicated on market conditions the same way that industrial activity is dependent upon commodity prices and you can't have good stuff going tits up because of a bad quarter)

But at the end of the day you need some core of participants who at the limit are willing to pay to limit/cap/reduce risk and volatility otherwise there's no market because the whole market is bets and counter bets about how that core activity will turn out.

At the end of the day there is a legitimate business need to hedge against future uncertainty. Everything else in the futures market derives from this, though sometimes the paths are nonsensical.

by potato3732842

4/24/2025 at 1:59:28 PM

No, this is a common misconception. If hedging was the point, futures markets would show more evidence of risk aversion than they do. Again, I recommend that Williams' book if you're curious!

by kqr

4/25/2025 at 11:41:28 AM

That's only because the markets have been opened up to non-producer/consumer participants.

by Marazan

4/24/2025 at 12:50:40 PM

There is no loan necessary in the plane example. Future is an agreement that you will buy/sell a thing for set price in a set date. No one needs to borrow anything for it to work. To manage the repository, the plane company will have contract to by x barrels at 1 of March for some price. That is it, that is what future is - contractual obligation to with a set date.

Also, while origin stories are nice, most future trades are pure speculations on price. There is no reason to pretend these original stories are how securities are actually used.

Your story may make a bit more sense with options where one party can choose to exercises their right to sell or buy. Then you can use it to manage actual amounts of commodity. But futures do not carry any such option with it. It is strict agreement with no choices. The plane company can use futures to guarantee certain fuel price in the future, so that some short term market swing wont make fuel too expensive for them.

by watwut

4/24/2025 at 2:15:52 PM

> There is no loan necessary ...

That is also not what Williams says. He says a simultaneous long cash--short future position is practically the same as a loan of the corresponding commodity. (With the lending side being short cash--long future.) This activity accounts for many of the patterns we see in futures markets.

by kqr

4/24/2025 at 5:53:46 PM

That position has zero to do with managing fuel inventory. He was trying to argue this is supposed to help managing inventory in practical world.

These patterns are about speculation, not about managing inventories.

by watwut

4/24/2025 at 2:32:33 PM

A futures trade always involves variation margin, and if you read a margin agreement you’ll see it is a credit agreement. That’s so people don’t just run away from trades which are underwater and screw the other side over.

by seanhunter

4/24/2025 at 6:01:44 PM

That is something you have to do when you do speculative trades. That has zero to do with managing inventory.

You are not required to take loan to buy futures. You can do so, because then you can bet more then you have. But you dont have to.

by watwut

4/24/2025 at 10:50:37 AM

It would be good if you could do this with cloud capacity.

by keepamovin

4/24/2025 at 12:42:19 PM

Pretty much the Reserved Instance Marketplace

by formercoder

4/24/2025 at 2:58:12 PM

Did not know about that! Can you recommend an approach, any cautionary tales? Do clouds beyond AWS have similar?

by keepamovin

4/24/2025 at 12:23:21 PM

Doesn't make sense for e.g. compute because compute resources are infinitely perishable. Maybe could work for storage.

by kqr

4/24/2025 at 12:43:11 PM

I guess I was thinking more like: you pay for a contract for bundle of resources now, to insure you against capacity overruns, and to sell it back at a future date. You can probably arbitrage the difference due to on-demand/reserved-capacity pricing ratio.

But also i don't really understand what you mean by infinitely perishable? Can you explain more?

by keepamovin

4/24/2025 at 2:11:24 PM

What I mean is that 5 bushels of wheat purchased now and stored properly can be used just the same now as three months from now. On the other hand, at a fundamental level, 5 minutes of compute purchased now are gone forever if not used.

When a clould provider pretends to sell you five minutes of compute they are not really selling you five minutes of compute, but promising to split off five minutes of partial compute from other tenants to make room for you. It gets a little complicated...

by kqr

4/24/2025 at 5:22:46 PM

>Commodity futures are not for the supply of commodities.

This is a silly statement. Commodity producers absolutely do use futures markets to sell their product.

>More speculators usually leads to more liquidity and more accurate deals on loans.

More speculators also leads to more speculation which can lead to anywhere up to a complete disconnect of the price from anything to do with supply or demand.

Case in point: onion futures are illegal in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

by colechristensen

4/24/2025 at 4:27:18 PM

> All futures should be settled by the actual commodity!

Why? The legitimate hedging role of futures and options is often financial in nature, even for physically-settled contracts.

Take West Texas Intermediate as an example. That's a physically-settled contract, with delivery in Cushing, Oklahoma.

What if I want to lock in a future price of oil but I'm not in Cushing, Oklahoma? Nobody's going to create a liquid futures market with delivery to my loading dock, but most of the time I can get oil on the spot market from a local supplier that already includes/amortizes the transportation cost.

It's far better for me to use the liquid futures market for hedging and still buy on the spot market, closing out the futures contract before delivery. For me, it's as if the futures market is cash-settled, even with a completely non-speculative transaction.

by Majromax

4/24/2025 at 6:59:56 PM

I think hedging risks is a better example.

Imagine you're a software company in India, and you want to sign a 5-year contract with an American retailer. The retailer wants to know exactly how many Dollars they'll have to pay you for the software. You want to know exactly how many Rupees you will get to pay your employees.

Without futures, those two goals are incompatible, and the contract does not happen. With futures, the Indian company can decide to accept $1m, and buy a financial instrument that lets them exchange it in 5 years at current Rupee prices. They have to pay somebody for that privilege, but they know exactly how much they're paying, versus having an unbounded risk of currency fluctuations.

You can do the same with oil. Maybe you have no use for crude oil, but you expect your profits to fall as oil prices rise (maybe you're a transportation company locked into a long-term contract). You can hedge that risk by buying futures; if prices rise, you'll lose money on the contract, but you will make it up by selling the (now much more expensive) futures.

by miki123211

4/24/2025 at 9:58:47 AM

I’m not sure about “vast majority”. Barring some exceptions (e.g. lean hogs), many of the commodities futures are physically delivered (e.g. gold, silver, copper, corn, wheat, soybean, natural gas, live cattle). Financial futures like S&P 500, 3-month SOFRs are obvious financially settled as they don’t correspond to anything physical.

by frontfor

4/24/2025 at 4:29:41 PM

Contrary to people's expectations, it's not actually possible for "number go up" to continue forever. Privileged people have extracted value from marginalized people, the global south, the environment, and increasingly just domestic wealth inequality. There are fewer and fewer externalities you can profit from.

Not to sound Malthusian, but it was never going to happen that 9 billion people on the planet could live with a North American standard of life, and we stop global warming, and deforestation. It would be a sort of heat death for capitalism with no gradient of inequality left to extract value from.

Financialization is the last gasp attempt to make something from nothing. You're just betting on taking money from another person who is betting on taking money from you. The memeification of retail investing and the entire crypto market are the most naked version where there is simply no relation to any real resources.

by hbsbsbsndk

4/24/2025 at 12:52:13 PM

As good as the DailyWTF story is, it's not real. Coal is unfortunately cash settled.

Even oil, which is physically delivered settles physically in discrete locations. It would be pretty funny if someone delivered tankers full of oil to your office though lol.

by kchoudhu

4/24/2025 at 12:43:58 PM

As soon as I read this headline, I was hoping someone in the comments was going to link to “Special Delivery”! That one and “Complicator’s Gloves” are probably the most memorable!

by alfiedotwtf

4/24/2025 at 5:30:51 PM

Good job it wasn't a power future.

by gadders

4/22/2025 at 7:22:51 PM

I would love a link to that article lol

by speedylight

4/22/2025 at 7:25:31 PM

This is where I read it: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery

by beaviskhan

4/22/2025 at 8:06:05 PM

That writeup seems exaggerated. When I read the story, it was a newbie at a Bloomberg Terminal who pressed the wrong button.

by emchammer

4/24/2025 at 5:41:57 AM

Right. That one is probably fake.

It's not at all uncommon to trade a tanker load of oil, and this may result in the tanker being re-directed mid-trip, or being anchored somewhere for a while. Those are normal shipping events. (Yes, there are parking spaces for oil tankers. Here are the ones in the San Francisco Bay.[1])

I have read of an oil trader who bought a trainload of railroad tank cars of oil as a similar deal. That was a bigger hassle, because finding and paying for a storage track to park the tank cars became his problem. There is a market in railroad siding for storage, but there are not that many available spaces. Most of them are in Outer Nowhere, someplace where there used to be something that needed track but no longer does.[2] Managing this tied up a lot of high-priced broker time. Supposedly worked out OK, but nobody wanted to do it again.

[1] https://www.sfmx.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Anchorage-9-...

[2] https://sidings.ca/collections/sidings

by Animats

4/24/2025 at 5:41:01 AM

Have you got a link to a different account? This one describes it as an XML parsing error (expecting true/false instead of 0/1) combined with some hubris on the part of the the trading exec ("what part of ‘execute my f*ing trade’ don’t you understand!")

by rkagerer

4/25/2025 at 6:35:42 AM

Ps. I agree it feels fake/eggagerated, I just wondered if it stemmed from a divergent, true incident of some sort.

by rkagerer

4/24/2025 at 12:00:22 PM

This is like a friendlier version of r/wsb’s stories.

by sgarland

4/24/2025 at 3:34:04 PM

Somewhat related, from 2020, "The day oil was worth less than $0 — and nobody wanted it":

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/oil-negative-price-1.553899...

by throw0101d

4/24/2025 at 9:35:57 PM

I vaguely remember som enterprising guys decided to buy some sort of storage tanks and then “buying” the oil while they still could, for a quick buck.

by RaoulP

4/24/2025 at 7:58:06 AM

Futures contracts are actually somewhat interesting in how fully they are specified. If you want to see how Light Sweet Crude Oil Futures are delivered, that's covered in the NYMEX Rulebook, Chapter 200:

https://www.cmegroup.com/rulebook/NYMEX/2/200.pdf

by timewizard

4/24/2025 at 3:38:43 PM

I never really understood the "with delivery in Cushing, Oklahoma" thing, and the Delivery section on page 3 doesn't make it too much clearer.

Surely there are people trading in these contracts that... don't want their oil delivered to Cushing? The Delivery section makes it sound like maybe it can be delivered somewhere else if the buyer and seller agree, maybe?

And Wikipedia does make it sound like Cushing really can be a bottleneck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_industry_in_Cushing,_Oklah... But... how? It seems like such a bizarre setup to literally require all the oil to come to this one specific town, I assume I'm missing something obvious?

by ipdashc

4/24/2025 at 4:33:59 PM

> Surely there are people trading in these contracts that... don't want their oil delivered to Cushing?

A big-enough buyer will know how to get oil from Cushing to their facility, often by pipeline. One who doesn't really want oil in Cushing is likely to close out their futures trade before the settlement date, treating it like a purely financial transaction.

> It seems like such a bizarre setup to literally require all the oil to come to this one specific town, I assume I'm missing something obvious?

Futures contracts need to be based on the price of something, but the price of a physical good depends on location. Delivery of a barrel of crude to the South Pole would be much, much more expensive – and more variable – than delivery to a big oil terminal. Contracts for physical goods need some kind of agreed-upon reference point, even if most of the time things get financially settled without delivery.

by Majromax

4/24/2025 at 5:34:16 PM

Hm, makes sense. Thanks!

by ipdashc

4/24/2025 at 10:37:10 AM

This level of standardisation is indeed what makes them so liquid and useful!

by kqr

4/24/2025 at 11:50:41 AM

Oil is usually considered fungible.

Fungible is a word that sounds weird and I don’t get to say often enough.

by mr_toad

4/24/2025 at 1:57:11 PM

To the first approximation, yes. But there are different standards for oil and they trade at different prices (e.g. Brent is more expensive than Urals).

by praptak

4/24/2025 at 12:44:39 PM

Like commodity I suppose it also gets used to describe things that may not be 100% fungible but may be pretty close depending on the details and the circumstances.

by ghaff

4/24/2025 at 12:15:11 PM

If you are looking for more opportunities, recall that the difference between entities and value objects in domain-driven design is that value objects are fungible.

by kqr

4/24/2025 at 12:29:55 PM

Originally I had planned to pursue geology as a career, and studied it at college. In those days there was still a significant element of the course which concerned hand specimens. Mostly rocks and minerals, but also an impressive display of different crude oils from around the world. High or low sulphur, viscosity, density. Uncapping the small tubes would stink up the whole room pretty quickly.

by nickdothutton

4/24/2025 at 12:52:55 PM

I think a lot of that strong smell is the mercaptans (organosulfur compounds) which are very pungent. Funnily enough that's what gets added back in to natural gas so people can smell if there is a leak.

by HPsquared

4/24/2025 at 7:15:08 PM

Probably hydrogen sulphide, the active ingredient in stink bombs.

by mr_toad

4/24/2025 at 7:42:48 AM

I want to buy pork bellies and frozen concentrated orange juice.

by austinallegro

4/24/2025 at 8:06:01 AM

Randolph, I will wager you one dollar that an LLM, if put in a fine suit, could do just a good a job as any of our traders.

by mihaic

4/24/2025 at 12:41:10 PM

That was such a good movie. All the leads and even not so leads were at the top of their form.

by ghaff

4/24/2025 at 8:16:14 AM

"Mr Duke your brother is unwell!"

"F*K HIM!!!!"

by austinallegro

4/24/2025 at 8:59:49 AM

She’s an entertaining writer & co anchors a podcast called Odd Lots, for those unaware. Entertaining and informative on various niches of money & markets.

by steveBK123

4/24/2025 at 7:31:13 AM

The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis.

by bubblethink

4/24/2025 at 6:37:23 PM

I can recommend the NPR planet money episode ”The onion king” if you are into commodities trading.

by maCDzP

4/25/2025 at 2:26:43 PM

I wonder what the bitcoin is worth now...

by ANarrativeApe

4/24/2025 at 10:48:30 AM

Quirky and laugh out loud funny. Thank you for the post.

by keepamovin

4/24/2025 at 1:55:00 PM

I agree that was a fun read

by terminalgravity

4/25/2025 at 10:35:53 AM

Pure lack of initiative and stuck in a retail mentality. There are 10's of thousands of privatly owned wells, and countless trucks and shipping hubs. It is EXACTLY the same situation with, oh, lets pick, wheat, and a "bushel" whatever the fuck that is, I wanted one, and got one, and corn by the ton, and fuel oil, and coal by the ton, loaded onto my 1 ton truck, drive up to the fucking place and get some.......they dont realy want to sell small quantities....but they will.....mainly they are worried about civilians getting hurt in what are purely industrial environments, but standing y ground and bieng patient and respectfull has gotten me through many gates, loaded, and gone.......often it's the secretary/receptionist who decides, and pulls out a cash slip, then.the rest just happens, sometimes it's the plant manager, who does a hand wave and points after determining that it will be ok, but all in all, it's the same for everything, just find the person who can say yes and ask.

by metalman

4/24/2025 at 4:01:47 PM

Do you have an idea what one bbl of crude oil weights? Like bowling balls, it depends on the quality of the crude. 55gal @ 8.5lbs/gal to 11.4lbs/gal? 450lbs to 625lbs. Forklifts only.

by ForOldHack

4/25/2025 at 9:11:57 AM

A standard (now) actual chemical drum holds 200L, which would be 200kg plus the weight of the barrel if filled with water. Oil is less dense.

Estimations are much easier with metric units.

There are special hand-powered machines for moving chemical drums: https://www.salesbridges.eu/en/products/drums-lifter/

by Symbiote