But who is so much into (unable to stop) giving haircuts, of all things?
Now, if you‘d solely replaced the word „haircuts“ in this…
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People who are addicted, or have some mental disorder. I tried to find a simple example of a supply that cannot be reduced short term, while not being vulgar 
. I know, my attempt wasn’t the best either.
I guess, if I were to show what went down on a supply/demand chart (short term):
Long term negative price makes no sense, supply is 0, demand is infinite.
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People buying stuff they don’t understand
I think some people will not be happy when oil price goes up and their ETF doesn’t follow 
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I really enjoyed the new video from Ben Felix. Really gives you food for thought
The quote from Buffett tells you that when you want to time the market, you need to guess two things: 1. how bad will the news be 2. how bad does the market already expect them to be
The studies that show that stock market and GDP growth are NEGATIVELY correlated.
The fact, that you, as an investor, are interested in earnings per share and NOT the growth of the whole stock market. Stock market can grow by new companies joining, new stock being issued, which does not increase earnings per share.
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Great if you can’t get enough from him 
Actually I beg to differ. You either didn’t fully comprehend what actually has happened with the WTI May contract or you didn’t understand the analogy.
So let’s break it down:
‘you’ - is the long contract holder (speculators, day traders, moms and pops, muppets etc.)
‘commitment to receive escort service in 15 days’ - WTI May deliverable contract
‘someone / Everyone is with their respective girlfriends’ - other traders / long contract holders
‘pimp’s house/brothel’ - Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for the WTI contract
Well, it’s implied by the fact that your girlfriend stays home and you cannot have the call girl come over as it’ll get you in trouble (i.e. suffer great costs). As the contract is deliverable, you cannot cancel it without incurring costs (you can see this as the pimp coming over and kicking your ass, or, if the pimp has more class, he will sue you and then you’ll still have to pay up and your gf will find out eventually about your secret deal) so you prefer to pay someone else to take it off your hands.
This point I don’t understand where you took it from, which leads me to my initial conclusion…
Your analogy only works on the customer side. It fails to explain the producer side. Oil producers keep pumping oil from the ground, because it’s dangerous/expensive to stop. They need someone to take it from them.
The price crash happened not only because of reselling on the secondary market. Oil producers issuing new contracts also contributed. So, coming back to your example, I don’t see why a pimp/escort would offer to pay a customer for the service. For this you need supply that is price-insensitive.
That video is quite unbelievable and it’s a good reminder that you can time the market only if you are consistently lucky
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This was never my intention. The analogy I posted was explaining only why prices for the WTI futures contract went into negative territory for the first time in history.
Here you’re touching on a point which to me clearly demonstrates that you don’t fully comprehend how the WTI future contract works…
on a more recent news:
What you failed to understand is the Oil company make a contract to the first buyer. They will deliver oil for say 20 USD. The first buyer gives the oil company 20$. The first buyer now understand the demand is low so he sells his contract to an other trader for 10 USD. The second buyer now doesn’t want (and never wanted ) the oil delivered in front of his house. Because he would need to get money somewhere and rent a big place for 50$ for a total of 4 months. So he prefers to sell his contract for -40$ than needing 50$ to keep the oil.
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On the other hand it doesn’t hurt to follow the other macro trends. (and understand how complex this all is - and to not even try to endeavour in (short-term) market timing 
)
Just found this Swedish Investor guy recently, boils down some investing/financial books to short interesting videos. 
SP500 future still positive, so probably already expected.
I wonder what the total amount will be by summer, 50-60 million jobs lost?
Errare humanum est. You could fill in my gaps in knowledge instead of only pointing it out. Are you saying the oil producers were not affected by this negative price and the only ones who were hit were secondary traders?
Anyway, I will argue that your analogy doesn’t work. You can cancel an escort, and the “cancellation fee” will not be higher than the initial price of the “contract”.
I don’t understand why you guys make analogies when it was already clear with the real case.
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Yes, the „cancellation fee“ can be higher than the initial price of the „contract“.
It‘s called „negatives Vertragsinteresse“. Since the pimp in this case has no room left for the escort, he would need to rent an additional room. And the initial price is still owed as he is not able to book the escort to another client (as they have all the same problem with the gfs staying home).
Art. 404 Para. 2 Swiss Code of Obligation.
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‘Ain’t nobody got time for that’… but you can start from here
Nope, I never said this. But since you raised it, to be honest I think that some producers could have actually gained from this move - only the ones that are hedging their forward production and provided that there were still producers that didn’t roll their hedges until last Monday, for whatever reasons. You see, producers usually use the WTI contracts to hedge/sell forward their production (i.e. they are shorting the contract). So a producer would have sold the WTI May contract, at a positive price (say 30$/bbl) back in Jan/Feb 2020 (or even at a higher price back in 2018/2019 depending on their hedging strategy) and on Monday, if (and this is a huge IF) they hadn’t rolled this position yet to Jun or even further out into the future, then they could have closed it / bought back the futures contracts @ -40$/bbl => 70 $/bbl profit. If on the other hand they have decided to deliver physically the crude as per their short WTI May position, then for them there’s no impact from this move and for this respective position.