Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

okay so, what system out there is totally falling apart because it used an unsigned number to store price, since it'd never be cheaper than zero!

I don't get how that works. Shouldn't he have gotten a few mil for buying those contracts at negative prices, and then also been in possession of a few million barrels of oil?

The legality of who has possession isn’t the issue as I understand it, it’s the actually taking delivery of the stuff that’s the hard part. (Unless you have un-used storage for a few mil barrels) Unless you can pay someone to take the contract off your hands, that’s expected.

Right, but what I'm missing is how the loss actually occurs. I get that storage was full in Cushing so there wasn't really any way to actually take delivery. But how does that result in a monetary loss? That would require having sold the contract

And from that article, it sounds like the software literally couldn't process trades with negative prices, which would have prevented selling (and a lot of the language used implies that's exactly what happened -- specifically "locked in").