Participants in exchange trading include exchange members (who trade for their own accounts and execute customer orders), financial institutions, businesses that deal in the underlying commodities, commodity pools (the
futures equivalent of mutual funds), and individual investors.
The unforgiving options price models would have dictated that between 150 million and 250 million barrels of
futures equivalents be sold to assure the financial solvency of the firms writing the contracts.
Record Longs By the close of trading on April 30, money managers had amassed bullish positions across four natural gas contracts that totaled 456,475
futures equivalents, the CFTC report showed.