Item — HN Reader

The quantity makes it more than weird. This is not just price change or manipulation. Prices can move big amounts for weird reasons without significant changes in trade volumes. The volume of sales makes it significant.

$580 million sales of oil futures and probably similar amount of buys in stock futures means $1T quick billion move.

Nobody makes half trillion __trades__ for weird reasons and this was too short to be movement of sellers in general.

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It is very weird and suspicious but not out of the realms of possibility. And I don't say it because I'm vouching here for the honesty of this administration. Crude oil contracts (WTI and Brent - both same size) traded roughly 3m contracts that day. 6,200 quoted by FT is about 2% of that. It's a lot - crazy much. But not crazy-crazy-someone-is-defo-a-crook crazy.

It's not even a given at this point that all these trades come from one person. In fact I doubt they do - because most brokerages would simply not allow you to put this trade. It could well be a huge trade, but a fraction of the 6200 that changed hands, then HFT algos jumping in in the action.

Which is all investigable, and should be investigated.

*580 million

There was equity futures and oil contracts both at the same time. Total risked with zero public news was approx $1.5B

Notional. Those contracts have between 8-15x leverage. Looking at the CNBC graph linked you can see the volume better (though not the actual lot sizes). The likely at risk dollars was probably closer to 10M across both.

Sure, I believe that. But not 580 Billion. (I sometimes wonder how much damage has been done to the United States political system by naming them million, billion and trillion. Would we all budget carefully and precisely consider the relative impacts of different scales of expenditure if a thousand thousand was a woozle, a thousand woozle added up to a brillig, and a thousand brillig was a fearsome vogon?)