Something extraordinary happened this week in the energy markets. The main US oil price index, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), closing at minus $37 a barrel (bbl), yes minus, meaning that people had to pay to have someone agree to take their oil.
This happened because this is a physical delivery contract – that is, if you own the contract you have to take actual delivery of the volumes, so you want to sell if you don't have storage space or capacity through pipelines to a user – like a refinery – and the deadline is this week.
