Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense

charcircuit

>paying what in retrospect will have been an excessive price This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.

gruez

So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are? Should that be banned too? The article basically argues that any sort of edge is bad because it disincentivizes others from participating. edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.

noIdeaTheSecond

> "The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it." I think this sums it up.

harvie

Can you watch what happens on a market just before the press conference and do the same?

Havoc

The worst part is the sharp changes in the price being traded aren't achieved by magic but rather with guns & actual human suffering

giarc

What if it's not insider trading and in fact the Trump inner circle has been compromised and foreign actors are trading on the news? You might think they wouldn't want to expose themselves just to make some money on oil futures, but at this point, they are bringing in billions.

ruilov

I'd like to see the base rate. Ie were there similar bets at similar times when Trump did not make an announcement

clarkmoody

Insider trading laws are for the plebs. Tip off your cousin about an acquisition by a public company? Go to prison. Tip off your cronies about war? Business as usual.

api

I remember one take I had in 2024 after the election. We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting. Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out. But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.

Fokamul

It's done by Truthsocial IT team, they are tracking when he opens the app. Good for them, I guess.

yieldcrv

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

NordStreamYacht

Is this an oligarchy or a kakistocracy?

5o3lad

The corruption is a welcome byproduct of Trump's role as a Reality TV host who has to keep the conflict going and Hormuz closed. The fact that he is talking peace again now is just because he cannot attack before the meeting with Xi in mid May. The real issue is US energy dominance and control of the sea routes. Which Krugman does not mention, because the effort is bipartisan and he probably likes it. The US literally has a National Energy Dominance Council: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook-rema... It is designed to subjugate and increase EU and Asian dependencies on US exports. The EU committed to buying $750 billion in US energy exports. LNG terminals in Alaska are being approved to make Asia dependent on US energy. This process is accelerated by the emerging forever conflict that will keep Hormuz closed. It won't be a full scale war, just pinpricks so that shipping companies don't dare to cross Hormuz. Maybe China is able to pressure Iran in a way that the US can no longer pretend it has the right to intercept Iranian ships. But Russia is another factor: The closure of Hormuz benefits both Russia and the US and the EU is too incompetent to negotiate Trump-style and threaten (it does not necessarily have to happen) to resume Russian imports. In an ideal world it would also block US vessels from entering the Baltic sea, because since the Greenland and now the overt Gulf energy threats the US is no longer an ally.

SoftTalker

If you are trading in the futures market and you don't have inside info or are not an actual supplier of the commodity, you are the sucker.

usualtuesday

Yes, the article is right. And every time an article like this is published, HN predictably goes into the same tirade. What are you actually going to do about it? Nothing. So keep complaining and hoping things change without changing.

coredog64

By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's - Paul Krugman, 1998 Excuse me if I take the Krug-o-tron's opinions with a grain of salt.

bkovacev

So, what should we buy next? There can be bread for all of us :D

imglorp

What if the whole point of the war was planned to generate trading opportunities? Every crazy tweet or announcement another cash out. It's like every time you see a poorly run business and you think, how can they stay open? The answer is it's usually a laundering operation, a tax shelter, and who knows what else. The message to us poors is, nothing these people do is as it appears; there's always a bunch of stacked, leveraged advantages. https://newrepublic.com/post/192244/trump-celebrates-destroy...

vinceguidry

brb, directing ai to build an app notifying me of oil futures volume spikes

hatradiowigwam

Welcome to the world of commodity trading. There is no SEC here, and this is business as usual. You can look at T&S to see this for yourself, but this is (like it or not) how this typically goes in commodity markets.