Times Online – Several hedge funds face big financial losses after wrongly predicting that oil and gas prices would rise as a result of Hurricane Gustav slamming into the Gulf coast of the US earlier this week.
As Gustav swept towards New Orleans on Monday, catastrophe experts were predicting insured losses of up to $7 billion (£3.9 billion) as offshore oil rigs faced destruction and the storm threatened energy supplies.
Commodities hedge funds saw the glum prediction as an opportunity, betting heavily, using the futures market, that prices would surge in the wake of the hurricane chaos.
In New York, crude oil leapt to $116 a barrel in the hours before Gustav hit the US coastline. On Nymex, natural gas futures rose 45.3 cents to $8.278 per 1,000 cubic feet. However, the experts, and the hedge funds, were caught out. By the time the storm was sending water lapping over New Orleans’s flood barriers, Gustav had been downgraded by the National Hurricane Centre to a Category 1 event. Oil eased to $105.46, with dealers soon speculating that it would fall to $100.
