You don't hear Canadians complaining about natural gas futures

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Saudi Arabia announced its intentions to discard the New York Mercantile Exchange WTI price as the benchmark for pricing its own sales to the United States in exchange for an index composed of a number of sour crudes that more closely resemble its own. The primary reason given seems to be that such an index would be less influenced by the volatile futures market.

Could natural gas be far behind? The United States does import about 15% of its natural gas from Canada, but you don't hear the Canadians complaining about the (more volatile) natural gas futures.

According to reports, the Saudis say they lose money because of the volatility of the NYMEX WTI contract and because speculators push the price around. You can read that to mean that they just don't have a clue how to deal with the day-to-day, week-to-week or even month-to-month movements in market prices. How about a course in elementary hedging? Just because they are one of the top exporters of crude oil, does that put them in the know for what the price of crude oil "should" be?

I suspect they could probably learn a bit about markets from the Canadians. Natural gas futures have been around since 1990 and crude oil futures since 1986. Some just learn faster than others.