On April 20, 2020, the price of the May 2020 NYMEX WTI crude oil futures contract dropped to -$37.63 per barrel. This podcast investigates the plausible reasons behind this unprecedented event from a different perspective. In my podcast, I will explain the macroeconomic and geopolitical antecedents, the inventories and futures markets activities that preceded the negative price event, and finally, I will exonerate the United States Oil fund (USO) as the trigger of the negative price. This podcast is built upon the paper: “The Negative Pricing of the May 2020 WTI Crude Oil Futures Contract”, co-authored with Prof. Joelle Miffre (Audencia Business School, France) and Prof. Ana-Maria Fuertes (Bayes Business School, UK), and recently published in the Energy Journal.
Adrian Fernandez-Perez
Dr. Adrian Fernandez-Perez is from a small island called Gran Canaria (Spain) where he did his PhD in Economics. He is Senior Research Fellow at Auckland Centre for Financial Research (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand). His research focuses on the pricing of commodities and behavioral finance. His articles are published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance or the Energy Journal, among others. As testimonies of the relevance of his research to the industry, his work is featured in media and practitioners' journals (Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, Global Commodities Applied Research Digest, Hedge Funds Review, Investment and Pension Europe, or The Conversation), and was awarded grants from financial market participants such as INQUIRE UK, BA/Leverhulme or AFAANZ.He is also member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Global Commodities Applied Research Digest.