Oil Rigs Around the time of the February oil crash, we first mused whether OPEC had developed a curious habit of jawboning oil prices higher with the help of flashing headlines at times of peak short positions among the hedge fund community, to launch HFT-momentum facilitated short squeezes. We followed up most recently in an August post , when we said that “OPEC started releasing tactical headlines at key inflection points about an imminent oil production freeze (which not only never arrived but has since seen Saudi Arabia’s output grow to record levels) which we first suggested were meant to trigger a short squeeze among headline scanning HFT algos, our suggestion was – as is often the case – dismissed as yet another conspiracy theory, although we admitted that “one can debate whether OPEC’s “headline” leaks are timed to coincide with near-record short positions on WTI.” Fast forward several […]