Commodities Collapse

Pty the poor margin clerks.
You are reading that right, oil down $9.63.
From FT Alphaville:

A bloody day across the commodities complex.

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And FTA's earlier post:
Commodity sell-off 2011: is this it?

Some commodity market curios on Thursday May 5, 2011:

Number 1 - Standard deviations.
Courtesy of Reuters’ John Kemp, and regarding the day’s exceedingly epic oil price move (as illustrated below):

Since 1990, the standard deviation of daily price changes in front-month Brent crude (LCOc1) has been 1.64% (ignoring signs). Today’s current change is 6.1% (at time of writing) That is approximately 3.72 standard deviations IF price movements were normally distributed (which we know they are not), price movements should be within 1 standard deviation about 66% of the time, 2 standard deviations 95% of the time, 3 standard deviations about 99.7% of the time, and 4 standard deviations 99.99% of the time

Number 2 – Extraordinary derivative statistics...MORE