Strategies · Core
Commodity Crack / Calendar Spread
Trade refined-product minus crude (crack) or nearby-versus-deferred calendars — commodity relative value, not a directional oil call.
Definition
Crack: long gasoline/distillate, short crude, in refinery ratios. Calendar: long one tenor, short another on the same curve. Mean-revert or carry-ride the spread. Inventory and outages are the fundamentals; the z-score is not enough.
Why it matters
It is how a commodity desk expresses structure. Margin and curve convexity are first-class.
Case
A crack that blows out on a refinery outage. The mean-reversion rule is early. The inventory story was the trade.
How to read it
Ratio, tenors, and margin. A 3:2:1 crack is a refinery book, not a pair-trade toy.
No query has been run yet. Which is tragically normal for most knowledge systems, but we are trying to evolve past decorative databases.