It’s no big secret that growth in real demand for commodities is nowhere near as much as the growth in daily trading of derivative contracts. Still, UBS Global Asset Management’s Tom Digenan (by way of USAA Financial Newsletters) has a chart showing actual oil demand grew to 85.9 million bpd in 2007 from 74.6 million bpd a decade earlier. During the same period, oil futures trading volume skyrocketed to 1.2 billion contracts per day compared to 200 million in 1997. That’s an annualized growth difference of around 20:1! continue reading…