A final point of difference we have with Culp and Miller is our claim that MGRM was actively speculating in oil derivatives. Although Culp and Miller downplay this possibility, we think their representation of MGRM’s strategy as “synthetic storage” makes our point. The firm was not hedging any real storage activity. Rather it was constructing storage using the financial markets, betting that the prevailing cost of long-term deliveries relative to the implicit cost of storage reflected in the history of short-term oil futures prices. We have already pointed out above that this strategy is essentially a speculation on the basis risk. There seems to be agreement on the formal mathematical facts describing MGRM’s strategy but some difference in how we each judge these facts. We claim, moreover, that a careful examination of MGRM’s actual business plan as well as the history of its trading activities and most especially the exaggerated size of its stack all lead one to the conclusion the MGRM’s management was speculating. It was MGRM’s management who justified the rolling stack using calculations of the historic profit an arbitrary investor would have made rolling over a one-month crude oil futures contract: these calculations did not include any careful analysis of the net present value of synthetic storage. The calculations in the business plan regarding synthetic storage are riddled with assumptions about mispriced contracts and the opportunity available to profit by buying in at highs and selling at lows. Nowhere in the business plan does MGRM’s management do any accounting for basis risk and the appropriate discount to charge for it. Not only was MGRM’s strategy speculative, but it exhibited all the features of classically mistaken speculations. MGRM’s decision to run a “front-toback” strategy is just the oil market equivalent of riding the yield curve in the bond market, with all the dangerous consequences that entails.