The Korea Times
LONDON — Investors placed an approximately $950 million bet on oil prices falling just hours before the U.S. and Iran announced a ceasefire, the latest large wager on the direction of the world's most traded commodity ahead of a major policy announcement by President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, investors sold a combined 8,600 lots of Brent and U.S. crude futures at 1945 GMT, according to LSEG data. At around 2230 GMT on Tuesday, Trump stepped back from threatening the destruction of "a whole civilization" and announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, knocking crude futures down by some 15 percent to below $100 a barrel at the start of Wednesday's official trading session. Taking large positions on oil prices rising or falling is not unusual as traders use them to hedge large volumes of physical oil trade. But such deals are very rarely done in big lots, as traders prefer to use sweeping orders across many exchanges and ask brokers to use algorithmic trading over many hours to execute the order to avoid impacting prices with their bets. Large orders also are seldom executed after settlem
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