In this post, I briefly describe the event of negative prices market which occured on the NYMEX WTI crude oil May contract
Event description
On April 15, 2020, the CME clearing released an advisory notice mentioning the possibility of negative prices in some NYMEX energy contracts. They indicate that their environment and message format are ready to handle such situation, see the CME advisory notice.
On April 20, 2020, at the end of the trading day and one day before the contract expires, the May futures contract written on WTI crude oil and traded on NYMEX reached the negative territory for the first time and even dropped to -40.