Sell at $95 a barrel then buy back at $67 for a profit of $582M.
"Joe Biden, master oil trader
The president has turned volatility into profit.
He has a high-stakes job. War and natural disasters keep him on his toes. He is often on a plane to far-flung places, travelling to negotiate with local leaders. He has the best intelligence money can buy. And as November’s election nears, he will spend lots of time looking at lines on charts. The American president and swashbuckling oil traders, it turns out, have a lot in common.
Indeed, Joe Biden also seems to have a knack for the oil trade. Two years ago his administration initiated the largest ever sell-off from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (spr), an emergency store of crude oil, to counteract price surges caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Back then, dwindling stocks left observers twitchy. What if there was another shock to the system? So far, however, Mr Biden has got away with the gamble. He is now refilling America’s tanks, and began a new round of bidding on May 7th.
In 2022, when he released 180m barrels of crude—or one-third of America’s stockpile—he sold at an average of $95 a barrel. In July last year, when the West Texas Intermediate (wti) benchmark was at $67 a barrel, he began to refill the reserve. The president has replaced about one-fifth of what he sold, posting a profit of $582m, and has managed to time the market to perfection.
Treasury officials estimate that Mr Biden’s early sales knocked about $0.40 from the price of a gallon of petrol."
