Gather round children, ole lady Setzer has a story to tell...

The year is 2008 and I was 3 years into this little career here. I was working for a small mom and pop shop that only did direct ship business. We didn't have much of a line of credit and ran into some significant...

margin calls as a result of the market run up. Being really unable to extend the line put us to where we needed to 'pass our hedges off' which is basically what a commercial who doesn't want to margin a position does by selling those shorts to another commercial

in 08 it wasn't easy to find another commercial willing to take someone else's hedges, but we got it done.

We were able to pass our hedges and continue to hedge all of those awesome $6.00+ corn contracts with our knights in shining armor....VeraSun

fast forward to October of that year, the board is like 3 bucks, we have a bunch of contracts with farmers anticipating delivering $6.00+ corn and VersSun is telling us to get bent

we were basically looking at going broke, there was no way we could work through the negative equity created by those contracts not being honored. I was out of a job before my career was even off the ground it seemed.

We had to have a meeting with our growers...

hat in hand we went to them. The CFO put together a percentage that if each customer agreed to take off their contract we could survive...

All but 1 guy agreed and we lived to trade another day. But you'll have to excuse me if market moves like this don't trigger a little ptsd