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Now trading at -$37.00. That's right. Negative thirty seven dollars. Today: -54.67, -299.23%. https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/crude%20oil%20-%20e
by symplee 6y ago
Now trading at -$37.00.
That's right. Negative thirty seven dollars. Today: -54.67, -299.23%.
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/crude%20oil%20-%20electronic https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/crude%20oil%20-...
- typon 6y agoI wonder if that negative int broke a bunch of code in software around the world
- keanebean86 6y agoWhy is oil trading for $4 billi.. oh no
- grezql 6y agoSon I sure hope thats not an Int. Its double, float or something else
- rjtobin 6y agoMight be stored as an int in cents (or whatever the tick size is).
- typon 6y agoThat's what I would do. Would never trust floating point numbers with something as important as currency.
- lotyrin 6y agoI sure hope "something else". I'd really like to think it's fixed precision.
- jetrink 6y agoTo be doubly pedantic, it probably is an int in many places, to avoid rounding errors.
- koheripbal 6y agoCorrect. In finance it is the norm to store all currency amounts as int.
- mcv 6y agoLet's hope it's a signed int, then.
- cpwright 6y agoOften trading systems represent prices as integral values; using fixed point. It eliminates some problems with rounding.
- koheripbal 6y agoCME website itself crashed for over an hour.
- TwoFactor 6y agoDo you have a source on this? I don't see anything in the news.
- greenshackle2 6y agoAnecdotally, CME wouldn't load quotes or charts for Oil Futures for me for a while around 1pm.
- symplee 6y agoCertainly messed up the Yahoo finance graph: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CL=F?p=CL=F https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CL=F?p=CL=F Look at the red block below the graph, where it should have gone negative.
- patall 6y agoInteresting math question: When we now start at a negative price tomorrow, what does a percentage change mean? Today, we have got losses >100%, unusual but obviously possible. But if price changes tomorrow from say $-10 to $10, is that again -200%? Does a change from $-10 to -$20 mean +100%? (I obviously know percentage changes are not made for this)
- gberger 6y agoI guess we'll find out tomorrow
- symplee 6y agoFollow up question: If it had ended at zero dollars, then the next day jumps to $5, what's the percentage change?
- marcosdumay 6y agoFollow up answer, it's never zero dollars.
- marcosdumay 6y agoHum... We can know this today with the power of Math! But seriously, changing to -$10 to -$20 is a +100% change. It's multiplication, this is how it works. From -$10 to $10 would be a -200% change. Obviously, only the mainstream news reports finance numbers as a percentage of change. Anybody else is only concerned about ROI.
- patall 6y agoWell, NYSE stops at certain drop intervals, so percentage does also occur professionally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_curb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_curb
- jVinc 6y agoIf I take 10$ to take some asset, and then later sell it for 20$ my return is 30$ and my investment was -10$, so my ROI comes out as -300% which betrays what's going on. So even with ROI, negative numbers throws a wrench in the machinerys typical assumptions.
- hermitdev 6y agoI work in finance. I literally ask this question of my boss today as I deal with market data. Didn't want a negative price to fuck with our systems (I've only been at the firm for 1 year, so not entirely comfortable with all our systems). Thankfully, we don't do much with futures, so we weren't too badly affected by this. Also, we don't use int's. We use proper decimal types for currency values.
- typon 6y agoArbitrary sized decimals? How do you deal with floating point math problems?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kccqzy 6y agoCertainly broke the native stocks app on iOS. The graph only goes to zero, and the blue dot indicating the current price was rendered below the graph, in the news story section.
- nerfhammer 6y agoThat's US oil (WTI). Canadian oil is WCS.