Good summary. > Why not minimize the front-running problem by making the dates you roll harder to predict? Instead of rolling the front month every month, why

Good summary. > Why not minimize the front-running problem by making the dates you roll harder to predict? Instead of rolling the front month every month, why not include some basket of CL1 thru CL12 and find opportune times to roll? While this is being done by some funds, I would think volume is an issue. I'm not very familiar with non-equity futures, so I could be wrong, but typically the front contract is the only one with significant volume for large funds. That is, until the contract gets near expiration, at which point volume slowly creeps up in the next contract. However, the article mentions that at one point UNO was 86% of the natural gas market for the near contract. To me, it seems almost negligent if you're the fund manager to allow it to swell to that size. No wonder arbitrage funds are popping up to pick them off. > Once these ETFs got popular, why not invest in some of the storage infrastructure and charge a slightly higher fee but give much better tracking to investors? From the way the article describes the major banks, it seems like they're already doing something similar to this. I wonder if they offer ETFs with this structure. The one thing I can't understand is why the CTFC thinks it should be trying to protect these ETFs from getting pre-rolled. There is nothing illegal going on here, it's just dumb, slow-moving fund managers getting taken advantage of by smart, nimble traders. An ETF which poorly tracks its underlying commodity's spot price should simply go out of business because people stop investing in it.