Comment by hodder

The street parlance in commodity trading tends to be more about where you are trading on the (time) curve on what is called “spot”. Ie. if you are buying near delivery (prompt month or inline) that’s often referred to as spot.

But I’m trading physical forward contracts technically and it depends on the specific grade how far forward that is.

The physical oil market trades in monthly cycles. On May 1 I’ll be trading forward contracts for physical oil to inject in June (which will transit for about month and land in July). For a liquid grade like WCS (Canadian heavy) I could technically buy phys “injectors” down the curve a good ways. Monthly, quarterly out about year.

Once a barrel is injected, schedulers manage swaps around physical ops with counterparties to ensure our tanks don’t overflow and we have a nice rateable supply. If a swap won’t cut it at that point, and I’m physically short to refinery demand or longer than I can hold, I can buy or sell distressed inline barrels (already in transit) with lower liquidity.

These aren’t futures though. Futures are standard volumes and typically settled financially. WTI futures for instance are typically not held to delivery, though you can deliver it into Cush if you have tankage. The paper market vastly, vastly exceeds the physical real barrels flowing though, so most of these are simply closed out bets/hedges.