Comment by emchammer
2 days ago
That writeup seems exaggerated. When I read the story, it was a newbie at a Bloomberg Terminal who pressed the wrong button.
2 days ago
That writeup seems exaggerated. When I read the story, it was a newbie at a Bloomberg Terminal who pressed the wrong button.
Right. That one is probably fake.
It's not at all uncommon to trade a tanker load of oil, and this may result in the tanker being re-directed mid-trip, or being anchored somewhere for a while. Those are normal shipping events. (Yes, there are parking spaces for oil tankers. Here are the ones in the San Francisco Bay.[1])
I have read of an oil trader who bought a trainload of railroad tank cars of oil as a similar deal. That was a bigger hassle, because finding and paying for a storage track to park the tank cars became his problem. There is a market in railroad siding for storage, but there are not that many available spaces. Most of them are in Outer Nowhere, someplace where there used to be something that needed track but no longer does.[2] Managing this tied up a lot of high-priced broker time. Supposedly worked out OK, but nobody wanted to do it again.
[1] https://www.sfmx.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Anchorage-9-...
[2] https://sidings.ca/collections/sidings
Have you got a link to a different account? This one describes it as an XML parsing error (expecting true/false instead of 0/1) combined with some hubris on the part of the the trading exec ("what part of ‘execute my f*ing trade’ don’t you understand!")