The CL options which has their underlying as the CL May 2020 contract already expired. You were probably looking at CL options which has the June 2020 contract as underlying.
Yeah, same with me yesterday also. Apparently they had to do a configuration change for the symbol to allow different fields to show -ve prices, which was done overnight
Not really. For all brokers who does not allow physical delivery (All retail brokers will be like that), the last trading date for May 2020 contract was last Friday.
Sq feet is an area measure, you need to look for a volume measure here. 1 barrel of oil is approx. 159 liters and that is around 5.6 cubic feet of volume. Multiply by 5,000 and you get an idea of the storage volume you need for the 5k barrels (5 std. contracts).
Ha ha, yes, if you are a professional oil trader and plan to hire an oil tanker or rent space at one of the oil storage sites or even dream of filling up your unused swimming pool or garden shed to the brim, then those volume calculations would make sense. However, if you are a retail trader dreaming of making a quick buck and wanting to store the oil in standard 200 litre oil drums and burying them in the garden, then the sqm calculation is your friend. LOL
Please elaborate why and how the bots executed your short squeeze. Wasn't the negative price caused by speculators, who were long the WTI futures, selling in a panic because they didn't want to take delivery on settlement day?
I suppose that if a real person was to buy oil on the next to last day thinking it was going to bounce and not realizing that he would be on the hook to accept delivery, he might have got a good screwing. And if there were thousands of people that uninformed, all changing their bids and asks at the speed of light, they could have generated that sort of action. Assuming they had the kind of money to pay out 37k per contract. If they got that kind of money by being that uninformed. Especially if they were so goofy they watched oil collapse for weeks and thought "This is the right time to go all in, when it's almost too late to get out" Or, a trading program that only knows to sell when the price is going down, and the harder it goes down the harder it sells. You decide. I watched the action on the ticker and it was so fast it was just a blur. But, yeah, maybe all those people combined moved in rhythm, not realizing what they were doing or the ramifications thereof. It could happen.