¿Puede caer el ETF del petroleo USO a valores negativos?

The Securities and Exchange Commission is putting a small plug in oil investors’ epic gusher of losses. The U.S. agency has stopped the United States Oil Fund (USO), a popular exchange-traded product, from registering new shares. Stemming the fund’s growth may help limit future distortions in a futures market wracked by negative prices. But it may not do much for the fund’s hapless retail investors.

Exchange-traded products open the door to complex, hard-to-trade assets, like commodities. Yet the way they work can be equally complicated. Take oil-linked securities like USO. Its assets had mushroomed to around $4 billion in recent weeks as the oil price crashed, and investors rushed in to bet on a recovery. As of April 20, it had lost two-thirds of its value this year.


 Investors may be hoping that oil, and USO, will recover. But USO doesn’t own oil directly. Instead it buys crude futures contracts, which are rolled every month as they expire. That can be tricky when a supply glut means spot prices fall below futures prices, causing losses for traders who roll over their contracts regularly. It also left USO heavily exposed as the value of short-dated contracts collapsed, driven by difficulties in storing oil. Most of USO’s holdings are now in the contracts expiring in June and July. If they go negative, as the May contract did earlier this week, investors could be left with little or nothing.

Now the SEC has pressed pause. It has not allowed USO, which is managed by United States Commodity Funds, to register an additional 4 billion shares, preventing the usual process whereby ETFs grow by issuing new shares to traders. The SEC could also be nervous about snowballing ETFs and retail investors that might not understand what they own. Or it might fret that USO could distort an already troubled market.

Either way, the SEC’s move won’t help USO investors much. It may even make things worse, because the inability to issue new shares could further distort the ETF’s price. They will learn a hard lesson that commodities futures trading is a game best left to sophisticated investors.