he Metallgesellschaft AG (MG) affair of 1993-94 conveyed three central messages to the petroleum industry: one pertaining to the relationship between hedging and speculating, one pertaining to corporate governance, and one pertaining to commodity market dynamics.
On the message of hedging vs. speculating, MG's US oil subsidiary, MG Refining & Marketing (MGRM), designed an innovative program aimed at rapid expansion in a mature but evolving business-the marketing of petroleum products. MGRM used a strategy combining over-the-counter (OTC) and futures instruments that contained a speculation on the relationship between near and distant prices. That speculation went against MGRM for a time, causing it to incur very large margin payment requirements and other cash flow disruptions.
Regarding the issue of corporate governance, the extent of MGRM's activities in financial energy markets appears to have caught its parent-and within the German system of corporate finance, its parent's banking shareholders-by surprise. When MGRM's speculation moved against it-for a period of time that may have been short-lived-it suffered large "mark-to-market" losses and large margin payment calls. The mark-to-market losses initially remained paper losses, but the margin calls were a drain on MG's cash flow that were larger than MG's management was willing to tolerate. According to some critics, MGRM's parent terminated the strategy so abruptly as to increase the size of the losses far beyond what would have been incurred with a more-patient unwinding.
On the aspect of market dynamics, MGRM's open interest in the oil financial markets-both exchange-traded and over the counter-became extremely large. When a single company commands such a large share of open interest, markets can become dysfunctional in one of two ways: the company can obtain the power to squeeze other participants, if those participants remain fragmented and disorganized; or the company itself can be squeezed, if other market participants begin to trade against the company in an organized manner. In MGRM's case, the speculative part of its strategy-the reliance on near-month contracts to hedge the bulk of its long-dated positions-required a rollover of its long position in the exchange-traded markets. This rollover was so large that other participants-especially funds that were adept at trading-anticipated its actions and, by "herding" their trades (not by design, but by widespread identification of the rollover), precipitated a change in the market structure from backwardation to contango. The emergence of that contango, in turn, caused the "rolling stock" aspect of MGRM's strategy to go from a source of trading profits to a source of trading losses.