Damn, always thought it's made out of oil related equities. While in reality , just another one of those - don't touch it because it has ,,best till'' on it. Normandy beach for noobs, unless one really knows what to do. It is sorta misleading ; placing something made out of equities and then, something made out of the futures, under the same word of ETF. (,,woah, something misleading in financial industry - as if that never happened before'')
source? edit - ok post is misleading, this wasn't some arbitrary decision. fund simply reached max size
Not sure I understood your question, but USO will keep rolling over every month in tandem with the crude futures. You will end up paying for the rollover, though. However, you can bail out of your position anytime, just like a stock. As for USO going belly up, nobody knows. If June contract dips below zero before expiration, there's a good chance that USO could go up in flames. But, again, nobody knows. We've never seen the crude oil trade in the negative territory before.
All depends on the ETF manager. It can reverse split, it can change it's multiplier (To be 0.5x instead of 1x), they can decide to shut it down (Although this is highly unlikely, since they are experiencing large capital inflows recently). Beware, the large contango in WTI futures is a strong headwind for USO price. So USO prices not only need a strong rally in WTI oil futures prices, but also a sustained one, typically lowering the contango. It's very difficult to achieve in this situation.
USO is not a good direct exposure to oil. UCO is more direct but also risky as well since it'x 2x. SCO is 2x bear oil etf.