Revision of Oil Futures Data Raising Eyebrows
Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 2:48 pm
I've had a hunch something like this was going on, what with some of the big one day price swings we've had in oil futures. Very curious.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/id ... dChannel=0NEW YORK (Reuters) - A quiet data revision that has boosted by nearly 25 percent the number of oil futures contracts U.S. regulators think are held by speculators is raising eyebrows in the energy trading community.
The revision means that speculators controlled 48 percent of the open interest in NYMEX crude oil futures and options as of July 15, compared with just over 38 percent under the previous classification.
"That's huge when you look at the numbers," said Phil Flynn of Alaron Trading in Chicago.
"It changes the whole way you look at the recent moves in this market."
The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission announced on July 18 that it was reclassifying some trading positions that it had reported as commercial hedging positions as noncommercial speculative positions.
The data revision converted approximately 327,000 long and 330,000 short NYMEX crude oil futures and options positions into mostly spreading positions held by speculators.
The big shift is all the more surprising, oil traders and analysts said, since the CFTC reclassified only one unidentified oil trader at the same time as the data revision.
"There may have been multiple 'positions' which were reclassified ... but they all appear to have been held by just one trader, and this was a very special trader, with an enormous concentration of positions in crude oil amounting to perhaps 460 million barrels, and not much interest in anything else," noted John Kemp of RBS Sempra Commodities.