August Oil & Main Street Game Theory

The coronavirus phenomena has so many implications and tentacles it is hard to keep track of them all; however, this article offers briefs on the amazing historical significance of recent oil prices and small business’s potential reaction to government “bailouts” which to us seem SO much more important than what currently pervades the news [0: corona! corona! corona!]. While oil and small business are mostly unrelated to each other, we simply touch on both topics together as “oddities of the covid” with the intention to give you some better focus and news than the “infectious disease & toilet paper” news which rules the sensationalistic mainstream media. As the Who would say, enjoy the “odds & sods”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yZHveWFvqM

August oil futures…

[1] …already made a 48% gain from the bottom, set just weeks ago. While that SOUNDS great, timing massive price swings is incredibly difficult — to borderline impossible. +48% makes for a nice headline, but does disservice to how hard it would be to make a gain anywhere near it. If you were an EXTREMELY gifted trader, you’d be “killing it” to make gain > 20% from oil’s price increase — particularly since you’d have to properly navigate treacherous contangos of futures markets. If you put that 20% goal up against the risks, however, you can understand why we continue to recommend staying FAR away from commodities like oil in such whip-sawed times. But our recommendation goes deeper than that, its rooted in the fact that we are…