Quote from Maverick74:
Alright let's walk through this, conspiracy theories aside. All the monthly strips are trading at .30 to the tick through the end of the year. The calendars trade at a significant liquidity to the outright market. You can move all the size in the world right now by selling the Sept/Oct strip for .30.
Next, all the 2011 strips are in contango!!!!! When specs are getting squeezed the market is not in contango, it goes into backwardation and they blow out the front end of the curve. This is NOT happening. In fact, the curve is very smooth and quiet and trading in perfect alignment. If someone wanted to move 1 million contracts right this minute at midnight, they could execute the trade in one second with Phibro giving them a tick or two in edge on the strip. Nobody is "trapped".
The oil market is driven by the physicals, not the futures. The physical market dwarfs the futures by magnitudes. There is more then enough liquidty in the cash market to accommodate any spec. This is not the Hunt brothers corner of silver in 1979. The physical supply of oil currently around the world is huge. The physical players will lay off anything in the futures market in a second with the slightest bit of edge.
The main driver in oil right now is Brent, not WTI and the Brent/WTI spread is very heavily traded as well. The oil market is probably one of the hardest markets in the world to manipulate because of the liquidity in the cash market and the fact that nobody has a monopoly on supply. There are a lot of factors driving crude. QE, geo-poltical risks, the dollar, and the distillates.