MG's Strategy: Put To the Real World Test Up to this point we have laid the foundation of MG's strategy and presented the profit and hedging implications. However, what sounds like a sound and hedged strategy proved to be a fatal error for the company. We will now examine the events that led to the failure of this derivatives strategy. MG's strategy hedged away the risk of price increases and actually allowed the company to realize a larger profit in the event of price increases. In a market where the price of oil
would increase, the company would make a profit margin on their forward contracts hedged by their long futures contracts. This strategy is particularly affective when the market is in "backwardation". Backwardation describes a market in which the spot prices are higher than futures prices. However, during 1993 when the majority of MG's contracts were written, the market experienced a contango period in which futures prices were greater than spot prices. When this occurs, the company is losing money each time they are rolling over their futures contracts. Since MG has to roll over their futures contracts almost monthly, they are incurring significant losses every month. We would expect the losses on the long futures contracts to be offset by the gains from the short forward contracts they have with oil retailers and this would hold true in a long-term economic valuation. However, German accounting standards make this scenario invalid. MG has to continuously account for losses on their futures contracts because it is accounted marked-to-market. However the economic gains from their forward contracts would not be realized until maturity, which would not have occurred until 5-10 years. This created a cash-flow crisis for MG as they are not able to continuously take losses on their futures contracts. In addition, they incur credit risk as their oil retail customers start defaulting on the forward contracts as faith is lost in MG. This downward spiral continued as oil prices fell and ultimately accounted for a $1.5 billion loss for the company. What seemed like a perfect hedge for the company transformed into a strategy that brought unnecessary risk to MG.