In the latest sign yet that the global vaccination effort was falling way short of expectations, institutional traders are shunning gasoline futures in favor of other contracts. Forecasts that gasoline demand may be close to peaking are not helping either. Reuters’ John Kemp wrote in his weekly column on hedge fund oil contract buying that funds sold the equivalent of 19 million barrels of oil in gasoline futures. This, Kemp noted, was the fastest rate of selling since March last year. Any comparison to March last year should be worrying, but it is especially worrying when it’s about gasoline. The pandemic was expected to—and in some parts of the world, did—motivate greater use of personal transportation at the expense of alternatives. That use would lead to a rebound in gasoline demand. This did happen in India, but it is not happening, at least not fast enough, in Europe and […]