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Money Stuff: Elon Musk Isn’t Sure About Tesla Stock

Money Stuff
Bloomberg

Oh Elon

Tesla Inc. is an electric car company, and you might own its stock if you think it is good at making and selling cars, or sell its stock short if you don't. But it is also, to an unusual degree for a public company, a cult of personality organized around its chief executive officer, Elon Musk. If you are short Tesla's stock, there is a good chance that you have a burning personal dislike for Musk and object to everything he does. And if you own Tesla's stock, there is a good chance that you think Musk is a genius and a hero, and you would follow him anywhere.

This created some cognitive dissonance on Friday morning when Musk tweeted: "Tesla stock price is too high imo." The stock fell 10%. I imagine a lot of that selling came from die-hard Musk fans who wept as they hit the sell button. "It is so hard to say goodbye," they presumably sobbed, "but it's what Elon wants." 

Meanwhile all the Musk haters on Twitter seem very confident that Musk is not allowed to tweet that Tesla's stock price is too high. I do not understand this position?[1] The thing that Elon Musk is not allowed to tweet is false statements of fact that are material to Tesla's stock price. For instance, if he were to tweet that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at a significant premium to its current stock price, that would be securities fraud, as the Securities and Exchange Commission concluded when he did that in 2018.

But obviously Elon Musk is allowed to tweet true statements about his opinion of Tesla stock.[2] "Hello, First Amendment," as Musk would say (did say). Musk gives his opinion about Tesla's stock price all the time. Often his opinion is that it is too low and should be higher, and he is not shy about saying that. In this he is like every other CEO of every other public company; few sentiments are more common among CEOs than "the market does not yet appreciate how good our company is." But sometimes Musk's opinion is that Tesla's stock price is too high, and he says that too. Not just on Friday! "I do believe this market cap is higher than we have any right to deserve," Musk told a reporter in 2017. "The stock price that we have is more than we have any right to deserve," he also said in 2013.

The fact is that Tesla's stock price is very volatile, and Tesla's performance is pretty volatile for that matter, and it is perfectly reasonable to think that sometimes the price is too low and other times it is too high, and if you think that it seems fine to say it? It is nice, refreshing, sensible. I think a CEO with a realistic view of valuation—one whose opinion changes as the facts change—is better than one who thinks his stock is always a buy; a CEO who is honest about his company is probably better than one who is a non-stop booster. There is a lot to dislike about Elon Musk's Twitter—harassing journalists! defaming divers! securities fraud!—but the defense of his Twitter presence has always been that it gives an unfiltered view of the thoughts of a visionary/genius/CEO/whatever, and that those thoughts are interesting and worth knowing about. Honestly expressing a sensible opinion about Tesla's stock seems like a pretty good use of Musk's Twitter, particularly compared to all of his other tweets.

Now of course you could complain. One complaint you might have is that Musk signed an agreement with the SEC, as part of a court settlement, not to tweet things that could be material to Tesla's stock without running them by a Tesla lawyer. After signing that agreement Musk went on television to make clear that he would never run a tweet by a lawyer, and of course he did not get approval for this one:

Because of his history on Twitter, he is required by a court settlement to vet any message that might be material to Tesla, though the definition of what exactly must be reviewed has been a subject of dispute.

Asked whether he was joking or if he'd had his tweet vetted before posting it, Mr. Musk told The Wall Street Journal in an email simply: "No."

So he did an unapproved tweet that drove the stock down by 10%, oops. Does this violate his settlement? Let me put it this way: I do not expect the SEC to do anything about it.[3] The last time the SEC went to court to complain about Musk violating his Twitter settlement, he had pretty clearly violated the settlement, and they still didn't get much out of it. Musk's lawyers mounted a robust defense, arguing that interpreting the settlement too broadly would violate Musk's First Amendment rights to express himself. That was after Musk had tweeted factual claims about Tesla's production numbers that Tesla had to correct. Here Musk has tweeted his personal opinion about market valuation. I do not pretend to understand the application of the First Amendment to securities fraud—I don't know if anyone understands it—but I am pretty sure the SEC will stay away from this one, and quite properly.

(Also it clearly does not violate the settlement? After his previous violation, Musk and the SEC ended up amending the settlement to require pre-approval for tweeting about a list of specific topics, things like mergers, new business lines, production numbers, Musk's stock purchases, etc. His personal opinion about market valuation is not on the list.)

Another complaint you could have is that Tesla just sold stock a couple of months ago, at $767 a share. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning writes that Musk's tweet was "a kick in the teeth for investors":

In February, Tesla sold $2.3 billion of new shares at $767 apiece. When Musk put thumb to touchscreen on Friday, the "too high" stock was trading at about $761. I guess the assumed discount rate must have changed or something in the intervening two months or so. 

It should have, obviously, given the Covid-19 pandemic piling more risk onto Tesla's already less-than-utility-like model.

Right, I mean, one reasonable defense here is that Tesla's stock could have been perfectly priced at $767 in February, when the economy was doing well and people were buying cars, and overpriced at $761 in May, when it isn't and they aren't. 

But I want to offer a better defense, which is that Tesla's stock price was too high in February, and Musk thought it was too high in February, and he expressed that opinion not by tweeting it but by selling $2.3 billion of stock. That is what selling stock means. You sell stock at $767 per share because you'd rather have the $767 than the stock. Of course that oversimplifies, of course companies often sell stock despite believing that they are undervalued, but in general the point of stock markets is that they let people who think a stock is overvalued sell it to people who think it is undervalued. Most of the time public companies think their stock is undervalued, so they mostly buy back stock, but sometimes they are sellers.

In Tesla's case, in February, Tesla's stock price had gotten super high super quickly for no obvious reason, and Musk and Tesla quite transparently decided to take advantage of that huge inexplicable rally by selling some expensive stock. "Tesla Inc. is selling about $2 billion of common stock, taking advantage of its surging shares just two weeks after Elon Musk said raising capital didn't make sense," was the first sentence of the Bloomberg story about that offering. This was not "we are undervalued but we need money and will regretfully raise it by selling our precious precious stock"; this was "we weren't really looking for money but if you really want to pay so much for our stock, sure, we'll sell you some."[4]

You could have other, purely theoretical complaints. For instance if Musk was tweeting that the stock was too high to drive down the price so he could buy more shares, I guess that would be fraudy, but he obviously wasn't so this is not a real problem.[5] (He's apparently selling all his possessions, I don't know, whatever.) Or of course if he was tweeting that the stock was too high to drive down the price so he could actually take Tesla private, then that would be extremely fraudy, and also truly wonderful and hilarious, please Elon do this, it is the financial story that I want to write more than any other, but again I do not think it is a realistic concern. (Musk did not get anywhere close to raising the money to take Tesla private at $420, remember; now the stock is much higher and, uh, there's a pandemic.) 

Still, sure, if I owned Tesla stock I'd be annoyed about this tweet, and 10% poorer. (Though the stock was up this morning.) Musk has fiduciary duties to his shareholders, and while those duties are not exactly "keep the stock up at all costs," this is kind of an unnecessary whack at them. Also Musk likes to complain about Tesla's volatile stock price. "As a public company, we are subject to wild swings in our stock price that can be a major distraction for everyone working at Tesla, all of whom are shareholders," he wrote, back when he was pretending to take Tesla private. Maybe don't whimsically cause those wild swings because you're bored one Friday?

Buffett, Boeing, boats

A crude way to measure the health of the economy, or at least the financial system, is, if you read headlines like "Giant Iconic Public Company Raises Money From ______," what names go in the blank? If it's like "Vanguard and AllianceBernstein"—big boring regular-way institutional investors that own bits of every company—then everything is fine; those are the people who are supposed to be giving big public companies money. 

If it's "Warren Buffett" then you maybe get a little nervous. Warren Buffett does go around buying big stakes in companies like Apple Inc., and he is famous and beloved and a prestigious investor to have in your stock, but if you are calling him up to raise money there is a decent chance that something has gone wrong. He drives a tough bargain—he gets good terms for himself that are expensive for the company—and companies tend to agree to his terms when they particularly need his validation. If you're a bank in a banking crisis and people are worried you might go under, announcing an expensive Berkshire Hathaway Inc. investment is a good idea, a strong signal that you'll survive. If things are great and you need some money to expand, you probably don't want to pay up for the Buffett seal of approval.

If it's like "Elliott and Apollo" then you get even more nervous. There are lots of distressed-debt funds and other off-the-run investors who will give companies money, but they tend to … want … things. Buffett will want a high preferred-stock coupon and some equity warrants for his investment, and he'll expect to do well out of it, but still in an ordinary, incentives-are-aligned, I'll-do-well-if-you-do-well sort of way. And he won't generally want much say in management. Distressed funds will want to meddle, and they are often comfortable with lend-to-own situations: Lending to a company, not getting paid back and seizing the company in bankruptcy is not necessarily a bad result for them. 

If it's "the U.S. government" then everything is on fire.

This weekend Berkshire Hathaway held its the annual meeting, at which Buffett revealed that he almost did some deals, when the financial system started to crack in March, but then the Fed stepped in and everything was fine:

"We have not done anything because we don't see anything that attractive to do," Buffett said at his annual shareholder meeting, which was held by webcast. The deals in 2008 and 2009 weren't done to make "a statement to the world," he said. "They seemed intelligent things to do and markets were such that we didn't really have much competition."

The famous investor's reputation allowed him to serve as a lender of last resort during the 2008 financial crisis, racking up deals that generated 10% annual dividends from household-name companies. But as panic about the virus and shutdowns assaulted equities in March and even began to freeze debt markets, the Federal Reserve beat him to the punch with an unprecedented set of emergency measures.

"There was a period right before the Fed acted, we were starting to get calls," Buffett said at Saturday's meeting. "They weren't attractive calls, but we were getting calls. And the companies we were getting calls from, after the Fed acted, a number of them were able to get money in the public market frankly at terms we wouldn't have given."

He is not alone, though. The Wall Street Journal had a story last week about how Carnival Corp. almost raised money from a frankly alarming consortium of distressed investors, but then the Fed stepped in and everything was fine:

The company, virtually shut down by the coronavirus outbreak, needed billions of dollars fast. With financial markets frozen, executives were forced to consider a high-interest loan from a band of hedge funds who called themselves "the consortium." The group included Apollo Management Group, Elliott Management Corp. and other distressed-debt investors that sometimes take over the companies they lend to, people familiar with the matter said.

That all changed on March 23 when the Federal Reserve defibrillated bond markets with an unprecedented lending program. Within days, Carnival's investment bankers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. were talking to conventional investors such as AllianceBernstein Holding and Vanguard Group about a deal. By April 1, the company had raised almost $6 billion in bond markets, paying rates far below those executives had discussed just days earlier.

And Bloomberg News had a story on Friday about how Boeing Co. almost raised money from the government, but then the Fed stepped in and everything was fine:

Less than two months ago Boeing Co. went to Washington, hat in hand, asking for a $60 billion bailout for itself and its suppliers. The company, which had spent heavily on stock buybacks and was still reeling from the 737 Max disaster, was an unlikely candidate for government support.

Yet by urging the Federal Reserve to take unprecedented steps to bolster credit markets, the Trump administration ended up helping the plane maker more than any government handout could.

The Fed's decision to use its near limitless balance sheet to purchase corporate bonds improved liquidity so much that it was a game changer for the company, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Ultimately, it allowed Boeing to raise $25 billion from private investors and withdraw its request for a government rescue, avoiding the restrictions that would have certainly been imposed.

You might notice a theme here. One way to think about these stories is in terms of "people are worried about bond market liquidity." Regular-way public-market investors want liquidity: They want to buy stuff knowing that they can sell it whenever they want at a reasonable price. The main structures of the financial market are built around that expectation: Stuff trades, it has a price, you can get in and out of it when you want, everything is efficient and transparent and liquid. 

But sometimes that expectation is not true, everything is confusing, stuff doesn't trade and no one knows what it's worth. Regular-way public-market investors are not well suited for those times; if you offer them inscrutable illiquid stuff they will pass. Another class of investors is set up specifically for those situations: Vulture funds (and Warren Buffett) have patient long-term capital and business models specifically built around collecting a premium for making illiquid investments.[6] 

When the economy seized up in March, it became very hard to know what anything was worth—who can predict Carnival's future?—and so liquidity got worse. Investors who rely on liquidity—who want to buy things for roughly what they're worth, and be able to sell them for roughly what they're worth—were not keen to invest. Investors who rely on illiquidity—who want to buy things for way less than they're worth, and who don't care much about being able to sell them—swung into action. ("Apollo Global Management Inc. plans to aggressively raise money to capitalize on demand for loans during the coronavirus pandemic, executives said Friday," etc.) The illiquidity-seeking investors charge more for money than liquidity-seeking ones do—that's the illiquidity premium—so a market dominated by illiquidity-seeking investors is going to be expensive and burdensome for companies.

And then the Fed came in and waved a wand and said "liquidity!" and everything was fine. "Liquidity," cheered the regular-way investors, and they got back in the market confident that, if they bought bonds, they'd be able to sell them. "Liquidity," grumbled the vulture investors, and they got back out of the market because it wasn't lucrative enough. 

It's really just a wave of the wand, by the way. You could tell this story mechanically in terms like "the Fed is buying corporate bonds, so regular-way investors know that there will always be a bid for their bonds, so they happily buy new bonds and resell them to the Fed," but that is not actually true, the Fed is not actually buying any corporate bonds:

Boeing's decision underscores the extent the Fed's policies rebuilt confidence in credit markets even though the central bank has yet to spend a single dollar on its corporate debt program.

"Many companies that would've had to come to the Fed have now been able to finance themselves privately since we announced the initial term sheet on these facilities," Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said during a press conference on April 29, before Boeing's bond sale. "There's a tremendous amount of financing going on, and that's a good thing."

The trade here, for the Vanguards and AllianceBernsteins of the world, is not "buy bonds from companies and sell them to the Fed." The Fed isn't buying, but also Vanguard and AllianceBernstein aren't really selling; they have pretty long-term capital too. They are not in the business of buying bonds for a quick resale; they don't need liquidity because they are frequent traders. They need liquidity because that's how the system is set up: They are conservative about not being stuck in illiquid positions, they mark their positions to market daily and need a market to mark to, they just like to buy stuff with a price and a market, even if they never plan to sell it. To reopen the market to investors like that, it suffices for the Fed to say "hey one day we'll buy your bonds"; that is all they need to hear, and it doesn't really cost the Fed anything.

Other Buffett news

He needs a haircut, my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tara Lachapelle points out. Also Berkshire Hathaway's first quarter was its worst ever on a GAAP basis, with a $49.7 billion loss. Berkshire is mostly an investment fund, and so it has profits when its investments go up and losses when they go down; investments mostly went down last quarter. Berkshire is also a conglomerate of operating businesses, though, and its operating earnings were up, to almost $5.9 billion. "Mr. Buffett regards that as a better measure of the company's overall performance and has long argued that quarterly paper gains or losses on its investments 'are often meaningless' in understanding its overall health," but that has always been a strange argument. If you look to Warren Buffett as an insurance underwriter or railroad operator or candy maker, operating earnings are the measure of his performance; if you look to him as a stock-picker then you should probably mostly care if the stocks he picks go up or down. Last quarter they went down.

Also he dumped all his airline stocks. Lachapelle:

There are also some industries that may be permanently altered by the coronavirus, such as airlines, Buffett said. Berkshire was a top-three shareholder in American Airlines Group Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., Southwest Airlines Co. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. as recently as early April. Buffett has since decided to completely exit those positions: "The world changed for airlines and we wish them well."

I remember when he bought those stocks, back in 2016. It was noteworthy because he had promised never to do it:

At Berkshire's annual meeting in 2013, Mr Buffett told attendees that the airline industry was a "death trap", saying: "Investors have poured their money into airlines for 100 years with terrible results."

Mr Buffett had sworn off airline stocks since suffering heartburn on an investment he made in US Airways in 1989. In 2003, he joked he had set up a freephone number to call counsellors who would talk him down if he got the urge to buy airline stocks. "My name is Warren and I'm an aeroholic," he said.

Needless to say the results this time were terrible. In 2016, I wrote about that hotline:

What if there was actually a counsellor waiting by the phone for 13 years, ready to talk Buffett out of buying airlines? And then the phone rang, and the counsellor excitedly leapt into action, but Buffett persuaded him that airline stocks are good now? And he emerged from his bunker (in my vision he's in a bunker), blinked in the sudden sunlight, and asked himself: Well, what do I do now? I would read a short story about Buffett's anti-airline hotline counsellor.

Well now I would like to read the sequel. Buffett's ex-anti-airline counselor has moved on with his life, gotten a steady job at a normal company, met someone, started a family, tried to forget the 13 years he spent waiting for Buffett's call and his ultimate failure, when the call came, to talk Buffett out of it. And now a car pulls up to his house, and he looks out the window and sees the Nebraska license plates, and he knows right away that he can never escape his old life. It is back to the bunker for him. One day, in the distant-but-not-too-distant-due-to-certain-limits-on-human-lifespans future, Buffett will forget 2020 as he forgot 1989, and again that phone will ring in that bunker, and our hero will have one last chance to redeem himself, one last chance to persuade Buffett that airlines really are uninvestable, one last chance to find closure and accomplish his life's mission.

Oil ETFs

The basic situation with oil exchange-traded funds is:

  1. An oil ETF raises money by selling shares to investors, and uses the money to buy oil futures.
  2. The price of oil futures is a number of dollars that can range, apparently, from negative infinity to positive infinity.
  3. The price of oil ETF shares can't go below zero.

This means, loosely speaking, that if an oil ETF sells shares at $20 a share and buys oil futures at $20 a barrel, and oil futures go to $30 a barrel, the ETF investors make $10. If oil futures instead go to $10 a barrel, the ETF investors lose $10. If the ETF's oil futures go to -$37.63 a barrel, as some futures did recently,[7] the ETF investors lose $20—their entire investment—and, uh, oops? The ETF runs out of money when the futures hit zero; someone else has to come up with the other $37.63 per barrel.

In many cases that someone else will be the ETF's futures broker, which vouches for the ETF at the futures clearinghouse and is responsible for its losses. Futures brokers are always pretty focused on customer margin and collateral, but until quite recently no one really thought that oil futures prices could be negative, so this particular problem was not much of a focus.

Now it is:

The manager of a $500 million oil exchange-traded fund said its broker refused to let it increase holdings of crude futures, a sign of continued risk aversion in global oil markets after last month's historic plunge below zero.

As a result of the broker's ultimatum, the Samsung S&P GSCI Crude Oil ER Futures ETF will halt issuance of new shares starting Monday. The Hong Kong-traded fund also bought put options to protect against negative oil prices and will adjust its existing futures positions, moving from a 100% weighting in September West Texas Intermediate contracts to an equal weighting in September, October and December.

Yeah I mean if I were selling $500 million of crude oil futures to a pristine box of money, I might want that box to be filled with … something like $1.3 billion?[8] I suppose I might accept other assurances: moving further out on the curve to reduce the risk of negative prices, buying puts, credit support from the fund's sponsor, that sort of stuff. But there will be some gap between the collateral a broker will want for its protection, and the collateral an ETF will be willing or able to put up.

Meanwhile people continue to enjoy trading USO, the U.S. Oil Fund:

Daniel Fernandez, a 30-year-old data scientist who lives in Pittsburgh, was among Robinhood's newly minted USO holders. After watching the price of crude plummet, Fernandez searched for oil ETFs to express his view that May's planned production cuts would fuel a rebound in the commodity. Last Thursday, he decided to buy shares of USO through his Robinhood account. However, he ended up selling those shares a few days later.

"I looked for an ETF with exposure to oil and this was the first that I found and it was the biggest one, so I thought it was a good one," Fernandez said. "Then I kept researching and found this contango thing."

Libor v. SOFR

The Federal Reserve, right now, is mostly in the business of lending money to everyone to prop up the financial system and the economy. Until a few months ago, though, it had a wider array of interests; for instance, it was in the business of tweaking financial regulation. One tweak that it's been pushing for a while is the shift from Libor (the London interbank offered rate, a survey-based index of bank unsecured funding costs that underlies trillions of dollars of loans and interest-rate derivatives and has been the subject of a manipulation scandal) to SOFR (the Fed's secured overnight funding rate, a market-based index of repo funding costs that is harder to manipulate). That push has not gone especially well, you would have to say; there is still a lot of trading in Libor-linked stuff and not so much in SOFR-linked stuff.

When the Fed is doing, or at least backstopping, all the loans in the economy, you might think it could use that as an opportunity to make all those loans SOFR loans instead of Libor ones. The Fed thought so! It was wrong:

The Federal Reserve has scrapped plans to use a $600 billion aid program for small and midsize businesses to promote the use of its preferred replacement for the troubled London interbank offered rate. ...

The American Bankers Association last month asked the Fed to allow banks to either continue using Libor or another alternative, such as the prime rate, for loans being advanced under the Fed's business-loan facilities. These are collectively known as the Main Street Lending Program.

On April 30, the Fed relented, issuing new terms for the loans that jettisoned a requirement they be priced with SOFR. Instead, it reverted back to the Libor benchmark. …

The Fed's initial requirement to use SOFR was taken by many in the financial industry as an aggressive move to discourage the continued use of Libor and boost adoption of its preferred alternative.

The ABA warned that it might undermine the program's effectiveness. "In the midst of a pandemic, with diverse demands on finite management resources, such an abrupt transition to SOFR would deter participation in the [Main Street Lending Program]," the ABA said in a letter to the Fed.

Oh well. A useful lesson here is that, in a financial crisis, one of the key constraints is people's time. There is just a lot going on, you know? You have to focus on doing the stuff that holds up the system, the stuff that, if you didn't do it, everything would collapse. Optimizing interest-rate benchmarks to make them less scandal-prone is a nice thing to do when you have more time, but it can wait.

Things happen

J. Crew Files for Bankruptcy Protection. After Quant Bust 2020 Comes a Reckoning for Stock Math Wizzes. Hedge Funds' Best Ideas No Better Than the Rest of Their Ideas. Investors blast EU's omission of oil from ESG disclosures. Banks to book more than $50bn against bad loans. Ultra-Rich Families With Cash on Hand Pile Into Private DebtArgentina bondholders snub 'disproportionate' debt offer. Hedge Fund Elliott Management to Finance Lawsuit Against Streamer Quibi. How did COVID-19 disrupt the market for U.S. Treasury debt? Oil's Crash Prompts Record Push to Store Fuel at Sea. Coronavirus Masks Are the New Concert T-shirts. Run on toilets leaves Japanese lavatory makers flush with orders. Murder hornet. "In November 2011, long before she was accused of murder, she explained the perfect way to kill one's husband in a tongue-in-cheek essay on her website entitled 'How to Murder Your Husband.'" 

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[1] Nothing here is legal advice, obviously. At The Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto called some lawyers. "'I don't see anything actionable here,' says Evelyn Cruz Sroufe, a partner at Perkins Coie who specializes in corporate governance," and I am with her, while other lawyers contorted themselves to find ways to express disapproval without actually saying he did anything illegal.

[2] I assume that his opinion really was that "Tesla stock price is too high." It is not an outrageous opinion; plenty of people hold it. I suppose he could tweet tomorrow that he was lying about his own opinion, and then there could be a tedious lawsuit.

[3] This, like so much of my writing about Elon Musk's Twitter, is called "legal realism."

[4] I wrote at the time: "If you run a company, and it uses a lot of cash, and a lot of people are really excited about your company's business and prospects, and they want to buy stock in your company, and their buying frenzy causes the price of your stock to triple in the course of a few months to the point that your company is worth $140 billion despite a lengthy and unbroken string of annual net losses, then what you should do is sell stock, at those high prices, to the people who are dying to buy it." That was very clearly what Tesla was thinking!

[5] From Lopatto's article: "The worst circumstances for Musk would be if he were buying shares of Tesla, or the company were participating in a buyback program, says Steve Diamond, a law professor at Santa Clara University. 'I assume neither is the case,' Diamond says." Yeah no Tesla is not buying back stock.

[6] We have previously discussed the more exciting theory, proposed by Cliff Asness, that really you should get paid *less* for making illiquid investments, but never mind that now.

[7] It seems that no ETFs were actually in these futures by the time they went negative, so this is so far a theoretical concern. (Some retail products *were* still in those futures and sent their investors bills for the shortfall; not sure how that's gonna work out.) 

[8] No real science to that number, but September WTI futures are trading at around $25 a barrel. If you figure that a $500 million ETF has about 20 million barrels of exposure ($500 million divided by $25), then a worst-case scenario might be that oil ends up at -$40 and so its position is -$800 million. If you buy stuff for $500 million and sell it for negative $800 million then your losses are $1.3 billion.

 

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