hmmmmm, I remember I learned something about supply and demand years and years ago, that does not apply to oil at all today since its computer and speculation driven!!!
Let's presume that the huge majority of market action is driven by HFT automation and/or Government intervention in one form or another.... Fed QE, Treasury, Odumbo-SUCK.. whatever What tools would you use, and how would you trade it? (BTW.. I already know one way but posing the question for those who don't.)
Mean reversion Long only Or you could forget all that crap and buy gold futures and don't touch for 6 months, watch your position get real nice without any work. And your country go down
Yeah it's kind of slow on that floor. Most of the action is in the options pits, whereas most of the contract buying is done electronically. I passed one local from the crude pit last week who was going home @ 11am frustrated because he was only able to get one trade done even though crude has been hopping lately. He says the guys are getting killed on the floor because vol is all going someplace else. Same thing happened to the metals - they closed that floor and moved everyone down to energy floor so instead of having 2 ghost floors, they now have one half-way decent floor.
These computer driven trades rarely represent directional risk trades. Rather they represent arbitrage trades of different global petroleum markets geographically and across the futures curve or classical future vs. ETF arbitrage.
All the markets are... yesterday , at the last 10 minutes of close the Dow made a 90 point recovery , the Nikkei futures also made a 100 point rally , but its Saturday morning in Tokyo and the market has long closed.
20 years ago people were moaning about program trading now they whine about algo trading. There's always a scape goat du jour. "You adapt, evolve, compete or die" -- Paul Tudor Jones