Traders Who Made $500 Million on Oil Crash to Stay Anonymous

摘要

A dozen commodities traders can keep their identities under wraps, for now, as they fight antitrust claims over their alleged scheme to make $500 million in a single day by engineering theunprecedented crash of oil futures into negative price territory last year, a federal judge in Chicago ruled Wednesday.Judge Gary Feinerman granted the unopposed request, ordering both sides to keep referring to the individual defendants as traders 1 through 12 and individual A until or unless he letsthe proposed class action to move forward in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.But the ruling is “without prejudice to any party or nonparty” that may seek to unseal their identities before then, Feinerman said in a one-page order.The lawsuit targets Vega Capital London Ltd., the U.K. commodities house that made a killing when crude oil futures fell $56 a barrel on April 20, 2020, to close at -$37 on the New YorkMercantile Exchange—the only time oil has ever gone negative on the exchange.