Net loss of $450,000: A whale's $15 million crude oil spread trade goes wrong

According to monitoring by Hyperinsight, after a sharp rise in crude oil, a whale address starting with 0xa314 adjusted its position to go long on WTI and short on Brent, forming a cross-commodity pair trade worth approximately $15 million, possibly expecting WTI to continue its relative strength.

From July 14 to 23, WTI and Brent on Hyperliquid rose by approximately 16.4% and 13.1% respectively, with WTI significantly outperforming. The whale subsequently established approximately 91,000 WTI long positions and expanded its Brent short positions to about 100,000 contracts.

However, after geopolitical risks cooled down, both crude oil benchmarks fell simultaneously, with WTI declining slightly more than Brent, causing the pair trade to fail to materialize. Due to the higher entry cost of the WTI long positions, their losses outweighed the gains from the Brent short positions.

As of the time of writing, the whale holds 86,000 WTI long positions and 90,000 Brent short positions, with a total notional value of approximately $15.1464 million. Among them, the WTI long positions have an unrealized loss of about $611,600, while the Brent short positions have an unrealized profit of around $198,000. Adding the previously realized loss of approximately $45,900 from position reduction and $15,000 in funding rates, this round of WTI-Brent crude oil spread trading has accumulated a loss of approximately $444,400.

This address is not exclusively focused on crude oil. Records show that it initially concentrated on trading semiconductor and memory chip stocks such as NVDA, DRAM, MU, SNDK, while also participating in index futures contracts like SP500 and XYZ100, with historical profits of $8.6 million.