Oils Endless Bid: Taming the Unreliable Price of Oil to Secure Our Economy

Praise for OIL′S ENDLESS BID "Eye–opening for anyone who drives a car or uses a lightbulb. Dan Dicker draws on his years of experience at the heart of energy markets and uncovers why Americans are paying the price for huge funds to gamble in futures. By the end, he makes his case for some real–world solutions to a problem that is bound to spiral out of control once again. As compelling as it is entertaining."—Melissa Francis, Host of CNBC′s The Call "Armed with the perspective of a market professional, Dan Dicker dives into the slick, murky world of oil trading and emerges with an illuminating cautionary tale." —Daniel Gross, columnist for Yahoo! Finance and Newsweek An industry insider tells the biggest financial story of the new millennium—how we lost control of our oil markets Leading energy industry analyst Dan Dicker recalls his twenty years as an oil trader and describes the huge changes that have taken place in the market over the past decade. He details the impact of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act on the oil market and how the financialization of oil transformed a sleepy niche market into a global Ponzi scheme. He explains how investment banks, energy hedge funds, managed future funds, and ETFs came to dominate energy trading and wreak havoc on the oil market and the world economy. And he exhorts government and corporate leaders to act to stabilize oil prices before it′s too late.

Introduction: The Oil Market Is Broken. Chapter 1: A Brief Look Back at the Good Old Days of Oil Trading. Part I: Oil′s Endless Bid: What Caused It? Chapter 2: The Assetization of Oil, Part 1: Commodities Aren′t Stocks. Chapter 3: The Assetization of Oil, Part 2: The Problem with Commodity Indexes and the Exchange–Traded Funds. Chapter 4: The Rise of the Investment Banks and Their Financial Finagling. Chapter 5: Increased Access to Trading Oil: The Trading Floor Goes Online. Part II: The Destruction of Reliable Fundamental Pricing of Oil. Chapter 6: Why Oil Traders Don′t Care about the Price of Oil––or the Value of the Dollar. Chapter 7: Oil Traders Couldn′t Care Less about Peak Oil. Chapter 8: Alternative Sources of Oil—and Why Investors Should Care. Chapter 9: Proof of Oil′s Endless Bid: Crack Spreads. Chapter 10: The Fuel that the Endless Bid Forgot: Natural Gas. Part III: Where Are We Headed? Chapter 11: What Needs to Be Done. Epilogue: Oil′s Endless Bid Appears in the Gulf of Mexico. Appendices. Appendix A: A Brief Review of the History of Futures. Appendix B: An Extreme Example of Intervention in the Futures Market: How 3 Dallas Oil Tycoons Tried to Corner the Silver Market. Index.

Dan Dicker had more than twenty years′ experience on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where he traded crude oil, natural gas, unleaded gasoline, and heating oil futures contracts for his own accounts. He is currently President and partner of MercBloc LLC, a wealth management firm, as well as a senior contributor at Jim Cramer′s TheStreet.com, where he writes on the energy markets and investing in the energy space. He has lent his expertise as an oil markets analyst in hundreds of live radio and television broadcasts on CNBC, Bloomberg, Nightly Business Report, and ABC News. Dan lives with his wife and family in New York.