> They have a fixed life, some number of months, and then they end and, if you still own them, you have to take delivery of oil. so far so good, this creates

> They have a fixed life, some number of months, and then they end and, if you still own them, you have to take delivery of oil. so far so good, this creates stability for companies depending on oil. > You can build a perpetual strategy around them—buy next month’s futures, wait, and as they get closer to expiry sell them and buy the following month’s futures, etc.—but then the thing you are betting on is not quite the thing you want. You are betting on the relative value of different futures, the shape of the curve, the cost of rolling futures, all this technical stuff. this looks more like gambling than real economic activity, how does this create new value? in any case in the end, this is not what the market actually has because "that product is actually impossible to manufacture"