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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (158814)	10/22/2011 8:49:46 PM
From: ChanceIs	Respond to of 206176

>>>Vitol and Trafigura, sold a combined 8.1 million barrels a day of oil last year. That's equal to the combined oil exports of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.<<< Have to do a decimal check on that. The world consumes roughly 85 MILLION BBPD. So when someone moves 1/10th of one' day's consumption I might chose to notice. But the US consumes about 18 million BBPD, of which it produces some 8 million. I am not so sure that Saudi and Venezuela produce only 10%. I wouldn't be surprised to find that these firms did 10 round trips per day and at most held .8 million BBPD overnight - 1%. Not to be ignored. But I would venture to guess that trading at that firm runs 24/7. I have no problem with high volume trading - not to be confused with today's fraudulent laced, bid-rigging HFT. But if they don't have the equity/margin to back up their positions then f'em. You know - like AIG had the equity to back all of its naked short CDSs. I might have mentioned that I am studying for the ERP certification through GARP: garp.org A basic - very serious - self study to bootstrap on energy trading. I might venture to state that it is the equivalent of two graduate courses. I was studying swaps and futures a few weeks back. The author basically stated that a swap is a futures contract which is traded over the counter. The settlement is slightly different in that the final price depends on an index, "L3D," and average price over the last three days - duh. The swaps also trade at longer hours than futures. The swaps market is much higher. Swaps are not standardized. I am ashamed to say that I can't speak to margin requirements. But since they are OTC, I suspect that each party takes on the counterparty risk of the other. IOW there is no exchange to back things up. I confirmed all this with a professional trader in Chicago this week. In case you haven't taken my point, swaps allow for the wild, wild west in commodities. They exist so they won't be regulated. Sound socialist of me??? I love free markets. But I don't want you to be playing with nitro glycerine next to my trading desk. I don't know why you addressed your post to me. whatever. I will have you know that Goldman has - check me - 80% of the gold derivatives. The UK Telegraph reported last Thursday that in 2008, five banks held 80% of the world's derivatives. Today four banks hold 95%. You had best believe that I had sent (and received acknowledgment) of that fact to my Congresspuke's banking ex[pert within ten minutes of reading it. For sure these large banks an unregulated trading houses will blow up the world's economy. The reknowned patriot, Robert Morris, arranged quite a bit of financing of the American Revolution. He even put up a lot of his own dough. Later he took out large loans to speculate in real estate. Something associated with the French Revolution caused a collapse of the American RE market. Guess what??? His creditors dragged that noble patriot and benefactor of the US from his summer retreat and threw his ass in debtor's prison. It seems that the US might have lost something since 1800. I have no love for these bankers. Quite the opposite.