I don’t know how it has been reported elsewhere, but in the UK much of the media has claimed that the trader who took oil over a $100 a barrel did so to get his name in the record books. When my wife heard such a report on the BBC, she immediately turned to me and explained a more plausible reason. “More like because he wanted to knock some option in or out,” she laughed.
My own equally as cynical theory was that he must have had some tanker delivery benchmarked against the close and simply wanted to ramp the price up. But perhaps we were both wrong and he really did do it just to go into the history books. Personally, I don’t recall ever meeting a trader who has willingly confessed to buying at the top or selling at the bottom. But you never know.