The United States Oil Fund is an
exchange-traded fund
An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a type of investment fund that is also an exchange-traded product, i.e., it is traded on stock exchanges. ETFs own financial assets such as stocks, bonds, currencies, debts, futures contracts, and/or comm ...
(ETF) that attempts to track the price of
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) Light Sweet Crude Oil. It is distinguished from an
exchange-traded note
An exchange-traded note (ETN) is a senior, unsecured, unsubordinated debt security issued by an underwriting bank or by a special-purpose entity. Similar to other debt securities, ETNs may have a maturity date and are backed by the credit of th ...
(ETN) since it represents an ownership claim on underlying securities that the fund has packaged. USO invests in oil futures contracts that are traded on regulated futures exchanges.
Background
The United States Oil Fund was founded on April 10, 2006, by Victoria Bay Asset Management, now known as
United States Commodity Funds, and the
American Stock Exchange
NYSE American, formerly known as the American Stock Exchange (AMEX), and more recently as NYSE MKT, is an American stock exchange situated in New York City. AMEX was previously a mutual organization, owned by its members. Until 1953, it was known ...
. The fund opened on its first day of trading at $68.25 per share. USO's investment objective is to include the changes in percentage terms of its units' net asset value (NAV) in its evaluation of the changes in percentage terms of the spot price of light, sweet crude oil as measured by its price on the
New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). Its performance is determined by the
price of oil
The price of oil, or the oil price, generally refers to the spot price of a barrel () of benchmark crude oil—a reference price for buyers and sellers of crude oil such as West Texas Intermediate (WTI), Brent Crude, Dubai Crude, OPEC ...
through its oil futures contracts.
[{{Cite web, date=2020-04-27, title=USO ETF pushes oil futures exposure out to June 2021, url=https://www.etfstrategy.com/uso-etf-pushes-oil-futures-exposure-out-to-june-2021-43854/, access-date=2020-07-04, website=ETF Strategy, language=en-US]
See also
*
SPDR Gold Shares
SPDR Gold Shares (also known as SPDR Gold Trust) is part of the SPDR family of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) managed and marketed by State Street Global Advisors. For a few years, the fund was the second-largest exchange-traded fund in the world, ...
*
Price of petroleum
References
External links
Yahoo Finance page for USO* http://www.etf.com/USO
Exchange-traded funds