OIL - iPath shares

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OPEC flooding supply?

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US fracking is the real swing producer these days, not OPEC, though the market still moves when OPEC talks.

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What am I missing?

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TL;DR: Commodities are to be traded, not invested.

LINK for OIL rating/summary. I'll quote some important parts below:
"The iPath S&P GSCI Crude Oil Total Return ETN tracks an index of a single, front-month WTI crude oil futures contract.
The issuer has suspended creations in OIL, which can cause the note to trade at substantial premiums at times. Also, OIL is one of a handful of ETNs with path-dependent fees, meaning you could pay significantly higher holding costs than the headline expense ratio implies...
OIL offers straightforward oil futures exposure in an ETN wrapper. It uses the most basic method for exposure; namely, near-month futures contracts (spot oil is effectively uninvestable). OIL's index rolls expiring contracts into the next-nearest month, a method also used by rival fund USO and our benchmark. The downside of this approach is heightened sensitivity to negative roll yield when WTI oil futures are in contango..."

If you don't know what contango is, then here's a LINK.

And if you want to see what contango looks like, I'll give you a chart of OIL and crude oil futures (/CL).
/CL:

OIL:

Alternate links if you want higher resolution:
/CL, OIL

As you can see, /CL and OIL both bottomed out in February 2016, but contango and fees have created two very different outcomes. As of 20 minutes ago, /CL is up 99.07% from the February 2016 low. OIL is up just 26.28%. I could make more comparisons, but the charts speak for themselves, so I'll just end this post by saying that any ETF or ETN that is long futures will suffer losses from contango when rolling over their contracts the vast majority of the time. If you want to profitably invest in commodities, you should buy stock in good producers of the commodity/commodities.

Is it time to bump the UGAZ thread?