Is This The “Mystery” Massive Long Supporting The Oil Market?

Usually when CFTC data shows a big speculative position, it is easy to spot the corresponding mood amongst traders. For example, take the current situation with the Canadian dollar. There are record net speculative shorts, and that bias is obvious amongst hedge funds and other professional traders.
However, over the past few years, I have been puzzled by the building of a massive record net long speculative position in the WTI crude oil market.
The monster speculative long position doesn’t correspond to the general attitude amongst traders. In fact, without looking at the data, I would argue most specs are negative towards crude oil. The data does not jive with my anecdotal evidence.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on May 30, 2017.