Max is monitoring the market, just like he does every day. In absolue shock he watches the oil price plummet and can't believe what he is seeing.

"How can I profit from this?" he asks himself, while watching oil dropping further and further at rapid speed. As oil continues the decline to below 2 USD he is shockingly and excitingly preparing his plan.

"I got it!" he thinks. "I'll just set buy orders at couple cents, it can only go upwards from there! lol, easy money."

He calculates and creates sell orders at just one tick above zero: 0.025 USD. One contract of 500 barrels costs just 12.5 USD for that price, so he figures, "might as well buy 1000 contracts of it for $12.5k, sounds like a risk worth taking". "Should it recover I'm gonna print. If not, I just gotta sell again for that price."

He creates his orders and patiently waits. Oil continues the decline, and eventually, not that long after, his orders get filled. Max is totally pumped and smugly grins at the monitor. "Hahahah, oil at 2 cents, how epic is that, oil will never be so cheap again! Epic 😁". He is stoked. He doesn't realize what horror is about to unfold.

Just shy of a minute later, oil prices move to zero and keep trading at seemingly zero. Max is confused. Zero? How can oil trade for free? What?? "What's next, negative prices?", he jokingly thinks. For some reason, order entry doesnt work anymore and his order window seems bugged. Max starts to get uncomfortable and frightened. "WTF IS HAPPENING?" he thinks while starting to panic.

He opens his browser and starts to search for the oil price. He finds a website that tracks the price of oil for the may contract he bought. "-10.00" it says. "WTF?! HOW CAN THIS BE? IS THIS A BUG??" he wonders in absolute shock. He tries to quickly switch over to his broker to make a market sell order, but it gets rejected. Max monitors the website again and is watching the oil price drop further and further: -15.....-20.....-25....-30......-35..... he can't believe what he is seeing? "Is that a joke?" he thinks. "Oil sellers are paying buyers 40 USD per barrel to take their oil???".

In shock, Max already starts to research how to take physical delivery and rent tankers. But it's too late. All tankers are long full. He consults WSB and finds people having similar problems, and can only further await his looming doom.

It's 1:30pm EST, the contract terminates, and trading is halted. The closing price is displayed: -37.63 USD. He lost 37.63 and 2.5 Cents for every barrel he sold, so every single contract of 500 barrels netted him -$18.8k. He stares at his P&L for the day which says: -$18.83M after his initial investment of $12.5k. His phone starts ringing. He doesn't want to pick up.