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Renewables are always cheaper. The price of fuel for fossil fuels will go up.

People have been saying this (since forever). On the rare occasion when you can get a proponent of the theory to commit themselves to a particular testable prediction about the real world, their track record is quite dismal.

Now, as a scientifically-minded person, if the proponents of a theory continue to make incorrect predications about the real world (or walk their predictions back saying 'next decade' for 50 years straight), at some point we have to conclude their theory is just not very good. This is the measure of scientific knowledge: you have to make a prediction ahead of time and then check whether it came true.

On the other hand, if you believe you have confident knowledge of what direction the price of crude oil will go by 2027, you can make a killing. I absolutely invite you to do so and will really have no grudge if you are right in your bet and make bank.

[ Note: there are very good environmental reasons not to rely on coal/oil/gas indefinitely, even if they they resulted in cheaper energy. That's a different claim from the OP saying 'renewables are always cheaper'. ]

I doubt many exchanges want anything to do with this fad.

Too late, they're already in on the fad.

> Financial data and political events cancelled interest rate hikes so far this year. September looks like a possible go for an interest rate hike.

I'm not sure I would consider 6% likelihood of a raise in september a significant possibility.

http://www.cmegroup.com/tradin...

The Saudis are forcing OPEC to keep producing oil because they have the cash reserves to operate at a loss for a good while and are trying to drive the US oil producers-who rely on fracking-out of business. The problem with that strategy is that fracking is becoming more efficient, which lowers the break-even point. Basically the Saudis are playing the long game in order to try and shore up their monopoly status.

That's 2007 thinking, and likely incorrect.

1 - The Saudis have already lost the battle to prevent US frackers from drilling. Even if no new wells are drilled and nobody touches the significant fracklog of drilled-but-not-fracked wells there is more than enough surplus production to last through 2020 when:

2 - The Saudis don't have enough cash reserves to hold out more than ~5 years at current spending levels and $60 bbl oil. At current prices (and look at the futures market) they're going to run dry early.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...

And note how futures prices have decreased even more since.

http://www.cmegroup.com/tradin...

Thus they are not playing the "long game" they are playing a very very "short game" of "spend on the military so the ruling class doesn't get beheaded and hope we can hold on".

Mid to low $40's/MWh is starting to get competitive with wholesale energy prices (PJM for example). Factor in the additional renewable energy credits that generators can earn on top of that, and the economics are there.

... prevent Iraq setting up a Euro-ba[s]ed petroleum exchange, ... the price of the dollar is pinned to the price of oil by the fact that almost all oil sales of any note are done in dollars.

The "lead" crude oil contract is a US-based product, but the European runner-up is still traded in USD and not EUR. If Iraq tried to force trading in a different currency by setting up their own exchange, they would still have to draw enough trading interest to unseat the other two contracts.

"Also food is not a true commodity".... Re-read what he they wrote "we let the commodities market manipulate the prices"

Without getting into the manipulation angle, take a look at the CME's agricultural offerings: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/products/#sortField=oi&sortAsc=false&group=2&page=1

Sure seems that "food" (well, the base blocks like wheat, hogs, etc) trades as a commodity.

Trading firms are always competing for the edge in trading speed, and have their own inter-exchange private microwave networks. Microwave beats fiber, as the speed of light through the atmosphere is nearly c vs high-speed fiber at 60% or copper at 72%. This technology has made obsolete dedicated high speed fiber lines for trading, some of which charted new paths through dense Appalachian rock to achieve the shortest distance.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Globex) already has one of the fastest links that can be constructed between it's colocation and the NASDAQ New Jersey data center.

Unparalleled Speed: Microwave connectivity provides customers the quickest market data delivery option from Carteret to Aurora – under 4.25 milliseconds (one-way) versus 6.65 milliseconds on the fastest fiber route.

What the article doesn't discuss is the exact nature of the electronic dissemination of the news. Chicago may have a time slew in it's time standard, or the release may have technically not been at precisely 2:00:00.0000000 - either could make an apparent time warp in the trade data. We would hope the article's author has done all the technical research before making an allegation that impropriety has taken place.

It is worse than that. The market is not even futures market. It is pure speculation.

On futures market, you can *BUY* or *SELL* a contract. Here, you buy and sell nothing.

https://icbit.se/CLG3

Positions are settled based on the corresponding futures price at COMEX (for the month of contract settlement) during the contract settlement day by transferring variation margin between contract holders. Reference information: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/light-sweet-crude.html

COMEX uses USD. So how is this using BTC if they are referencing COMEX?

If I had BTC, I would buy gold contracts. Sure. But you can't! They just sell you a make believe contract that then you must settle for BTC before it expires. Where is my gold then???

This is not futures. This is not even derivatives on futures. This is gambling on currencies value of BTC. No thanks to this scam.

Extra drilling did cause gas prices to bottom out. Natural gas, not gasoline. It's in the $2 range and has been as high as $10. We need to use more natural gas, but CNG fueling stations are hard to find.

If there is anything more complicated, I want to know about it.

Have fun.

It's a little more complicated than that... CME has a discussion of their match algorithms on pages 42 through 52 of their electronic trading documentation:

http://www.cmegroup.com/globex/files/ElectronicTradingConcepts.pdf

Not that it's necessarily that much harder in principle to implement 10 relatively-simple algorithms, but when you add requirements for performance/latency into the mix it doesn't seem that surprising that there would be some trade secrets in there somewhere.

At least the US stock market went decimal...

But not the bonds market! Sub-unit prices for bonds are frequently priced as quarters of thirty-seconds. That is, 1/128 is the minimum increment, but it is represented more like two super-awkward digits. The first digit is 1/32 of a whole number, and the second digit is 1/4 of 1/32. Most people have a hard enough time with non-base-10 counting systems, imagine a system where every logical digit has a different base!

Source: CME Treasury Futures Price Rounding Conventions.

Must be an extremely slow news day when you have to copy the content from Wikipedia and
UVB-76. Aren't there more interesting stories ( ie. Petraeus' admission of
a U.S. negotiated settlement in Afghanistan) or were the Slashbot editors consumed with shorting their S & P 500 futures contracts?

Yours In Minsk,
Kilgore Trout

You still have to pay commissions even if you're directly connected to the exchange.

Example:

http://www.cmegroup.com/company/files/CME_Fee_Schedule.pdf

Serious real markets also trade on abstract intangible stuff. Here are some examples

Indexes
Volatility
Interest rates
Weather
Pollution
Payroll

I always thought of a market to invest in film production, where your money went to actually finance a movie and entitle you to a share in revenue (if any). However, film making is a high profit low risk business and as such is reserved to a select number of people, and I'm not sure they need the mass investors for financing, they have enough money.

However I'm not sure where this "movie stocks" and "celebrity bonds" would fit. Technically speaking they are not stocks nor bonds.

Serious real markets also trade on abstract intangible stuff. Here are some examples

Indexes
Volatility
Interest rates
Weather
Pollution
Payroll

I always thought of a market to invest in film production, where your money went to actually finance a movie and entitle you to a share in revenue (if any). However, film making is a high profit low risk business and as such is reserved to a select number of people, and I'm not sure they need the mass investors for financing, they have enough money.

However I'm not sure where this "movie stocks" and "celebrity bonds" would fit. Technically speaking they are not stocks nor bonds.

If you really think that there will be a severe shortage of uranium in 2013, you need to get into the uranium futures market. Oct 2014 futures for Uranium are going for 47.50 right now. http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/base/uranium.html