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How to prepare:

Sell futures on Friday, buy today (to close out the position). Profit from the predictable price difference.

They have been trying to sell, but none was buying. The closer you get to the expiration date, the lower you are willing to go to sell. Since contracts expire tomorrow, traders are willing to go all the way to avoid getting physical delivery.

That's why I was suggesting the opposite:

(Short-) sell last Friday, buy today at about 0 to close the position.

Was it predictable tho?

Well, that was exactly the question!

Yes, it was predicted successfully (by everyone who is no longer holding a contract). It was also not predicted successfully (by everyone paying through the nose so they won't have to find a place to stash some barrels of a volatile compound).

It wasn't predicted successfully on average. Otherwise Friday would have already anticipated today's price.

How far do you want to take that argument? If successfully predicting it would mean that prices dropped to zero on Friday then shouldn't that have also been successfully predicted and impacted the price on Thursday? What about Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday?

Yes, that's exactly right.

But no one expects perfect predictions far into the future.

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