Investors placed an estimated $950 million wager on falling oil prices just hours before President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran, highlighting heightened volatility in global energy markets, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
According to LSEG data, traders sold a combined 8,600 lots of Brent and U.S. crude futures at 1945 GMT on Tuesday. Of these, roughly 6,200 lots were Brent contracts and 2,400 lots were WTI futures, representing about 1% of the total daily trading volume for each contract.
At around 2230 GMT, Trump stepped back from his earlier threats of destroying “a whole civilization” and agreed to a two-week ceasefire, sending crude futures down nearly 15% to below $100 a barrel at the start of Wednesday’s official trading session.
Large positions on crude are often used by traders to hedge substantial volumes of physical oil, but such concentrated bets are rare, as algorithmic orders across multiple exchanges are normally preferred to avoid influencing prices. Large trades after settlement hours, which run Monday to Friday at 1830 GMT, are also uncommon.
The Tuesday bet follows a similar move on March 23, when $500 million in oil futures were sold just 15 minutes before Trump announced a delay in attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure, triggering another 15% drop in crude prices.
Trading volumes have surged since the onset of the conflict. Average daily Brent futures volumes in the three years prior to the war were about 300,000 lots, but in the past four weeks, daily activity has exceeded 1 million lots, equivalent to roughly a billion barrels of oil.
Exchange operator CME Group declined to comment, while ICE and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees U.S. commodity derivatives, did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request.
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