few paragraphs down: By June 6, for instance, Vitol had acquired a huge holding in oil contracts, betting prices would rise. The contracts were equal to 57.7 million barrels of oil-- about three times the amount the United States consumes daily. Again I'd like to know if we're including options somehow in this number. But more importantly, the claim that you can compare the number of notional barrels of oil implied by a futures contract if it were held to settlement with the number of physical barrels that the U.S. consumes repeats the egregious error committed by Michael Masters in his Senate testimony this May. You can't compare the outstanding NYMEX open interest with U.S. daily petroleum consumption numbers directly because they are measured in different units. Open interest is a stock-- it is measured in number of outstanding contracts at a particular point in time . Consumption is a flow-- it is measured in barrels per unit of time . You can't measure how many barrels of oil the U.S. consumes without specifying a time unit. We consume about 20 million barrels per day, or 14,000 barrels per minute, or 7.3 billion barrels per year. With which of these 3 numbers are we supposed to compare 57 million? Fifty-seven million sounds like a lot more than 14,000, and a lot less than 7.3 billion. You can make 57 million sound as big or as small compared with U.S. consumption as you want, because there's an arbitrary time interval associated