Oil futures are absolutely a real asset - this isn’t Kalshi “who wins an Oscar” junk. Oil futures let consumers like airlines hedge prices, so their role in price discovery and liquidity is important.

When we had that oil glut years ago and traders couldn’t unload their futures, they found out the hard way that futures meant they were legally obligated to take delivery of real oil and store it, causing a mad scramble to figure out what to do with it when storage started running out.