Isn't this only a problem when shorting? You can buy and hold for forever.

If you stand for delivery, you pay to store and insure it. If you don't stand for delivery, you pay contango to roll over the contracts. Going long commodities with uncertain date of sale always costs money.

You are comparing oil/energy to a stock (a proof of ownership). They are too different things.

You can't simply buy "Oil". So if you buy an oil contract I'll expect, on the long run, to pay fees for storage at least.

Ever seen the story where the guy messed that up and they delivered the coal?

http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery don't know if it's true and not that bothered as it's still fairly hilarious.

I think there would be legs in a Silicon Valley/IT crowd style show about market traders.

Reminds me of this recent article where the author attempts to do just that: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/that-time-...

No, but you can buy oil options and play them just like stock options.

Storing oil isn't free (and by extension, neither is rolling over futures positions indefinitely).

You mean ETFs? If not, what is an "oil share"? Futures contracts have maturity dates. At the end you sell them (at a price you might not like), roll them over (not free or even necessarily cheap) or take delivery on the oil (also usually not cheap, depending on your facilities).

You could buy and hold until a stock went to zero, for example.

Edit: Whoever is downvoting obviously has never seen this happen. There was just an article about it on HN the other day, describing how Dragon lost it all when the company they sold to plummeted to zero stock value.