Cornering the market definition
Cornering the market. , in its classical sense, means buying up a sig- nificant amount of a commodity futures contract and/or controlling the spot supply to inflate the price. The cornering party will then settle their long position futures contract, and/or sell off the spot stock at high price for profits. Classical examples in the US include the Great Salad Oil Swindle of soy oil by Tino De Angelis in 1962, the attempted corner of the silver market by Nelson Bunker Hunt and Herbert Hunt in 1980, and the British energy firm BP being accused of attempting to corner the US propane market in 2004. It is also possible to initiate market corner events from the short side, where the incident is called a bear raid. A party can build up vast short futures positions, create a sudden surge of spot supply to push prices down, and then reap profits from their short positions (Xu, 2004: 27-30).