Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...

Motivated by repeated price spikes and crashes over the last decade, we investigate whether the rapidly growing market shares of futures speculators have destabilized commodity spot prices. We approximate conditional volatility and regress it on expected and unexpected speculative open interest....

Chapter 1 What’s That Got To Do With The Price of Eggs -- Chapter 2 Disconnections -- Chapter 3 Chart Watching.-Chapter 4 Higgling -- Chapter 5 The Human Factor -- Chapter 6 The Intent of One, The Intentions of Two -- Chapter 7 The Mystery of Manipulation -- Chapter 8 Banging The Close.