Do we know what percentage of futures participants are speculators just at the casino? It seems like the percent of players actually making/taking physical delivery is like 0.0000001%
Currently, speculators make up roughly 2/3rds of the outstanding WTI contracts [1].
In most commodities contracts taking/making physical delivery by physical players is rare. The physical delivery option is there to make sure that the underlying commodity market and the futures market converge; and you don't need someone to actually deliver to make that happen. The threat of delivery/taking delivery is usually enough.
Oil producers and distributors, airlines, power companies etc are major players in the oil futures markets. Much more so than, say, the gold markets where almost everyone's purpose is speculation, but less than agricultural futures like wheat and corn.
It's still probably <10% by volume, but maybe your .0000001% was hyperbole.
No, you're not. I was very happy with Stripe for a few years. As my business grew and I looked at where I could cut costs, I asked around and Braintree's model was going to save me 1% per transaction. At my volume that was going to add up to thousands of dollars in savings a month over Stripe. I went back to Stripe to see if they'd be willing to match Braintree's pricing, because I was happy with them over the years and it would have made things much easier to not have to switch to a new payment processor. But they only offered about 75% of the savings so I switched anyway. Turns out the APIs are roughly the same anyway for the basic functionality that I need, I'm not an advanced user. I estimate the switch has already saved me about $75k.
I use Braintree, money gets transferred directly to my bank, skips Paypal, but yea I agree with you I would NEVER have my income in a Paypal account for even 1 second.
