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MainFT’s Malcolm Moore writes:
Manny Newman powered up the 10 screens on her desk in London’s South Kensington late on Sunday night, bracing for what would become the most volatile trading session the oil market has ever seen.
Over the next 23 hours, the benchmark Brent crude price surged to as high as $119 a barrel before plunging to $84, the biggest intraday swing in dollar terms on record.
We’d recommend reading his full piece for interesting information and colour on a wild oil day. Here, as is FT Alphaville’s wont, we’re going to dwell on the trivial.
While Monday (March 9th) indeed takes the dollar swing crown, we’re sure at least one reader is currently screaming this at their screen:
Oil costs more in dollars than it used to. This is partially a demand thing, partially an inflation thing, partially a geopolitics thing — however you cut it, it’s a thing. Throughout most of the ’90s, a barrel of crude usually traded for somewhere under $20. Since the turn of the century, the average is more like $60.
As a result, it’s no great surprise all of the biggest $-terms swing days are this side of the millenium. And if you’re an inveterate or retired oil trader who suffered through roiling sessions powered by whatever the equivalent of “electrolyte drinks, creatine powder, nicotine patches and power naps” was in the ’80s and ’90s, you might well be feeling short-changed by the lack of relativity.
So, in percentage change terms, what was the craziest-ever oil trading session? Who deserves the bragging rights?
To attempt to answer that, we cracked out the standard ICE Brent Futures series — which goes back to 1988 — on the Terminal and got graphing. Monday registered an intraday high of +28.9 per cent, and low of -9.7%. How does that compare to others?
Voilà, a chart. You can prod the dots to reveal the dates. Note that we’ve flipped the X-axis to bigger intraday drops are on the right, so the closer a top is to the top right, the more crazierer the day was (ie the bigger the swing between the intraday high and low):
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It’s hard not to conclude that in relative terms as well as absolute ones, yesterday was indeed one of the wildest oil trading days on record.
However, given we’ve established this is all about clout, the early days of the pandemic (most notably April 22nd 2020, two days after WTI went negative) take the crown:
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For the sake of semi-completeness, here’s the context for some other days that stood out:
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And here are the top 10 as bars:
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We’re not sure there’s any use for these charts other than as fuel for flexing, but nevertheless we hope you enjoyed them.
Further reading:
— About those inflation fears
— The oil shock won’t matter much, unless it does
