Here's an extract of a professional newsletter in the petroleum industry. It concerns the cost of crude oil in relation to storage capacity.
“The cost of storage in the U.S. is high today because tank space is scarce and thus you have a wide contango at prompt in order to cover the cost of storing crude oil from one month to the next."
For info,
contango
is
the postponement of payment for and delivery of stock from one account day to the next
and
prompt
is used here, I think, in one of these business sense either of
the time limit allowed for payment of the debt incurred by purchasing goods or services on credit (Collins)
or
the contract specifying this time limit
or
a memorandum sent to a purchaser to remind him of the time limit and the sum due
I understand each individual word and I understand the global meaning of the sentence: It can be boiled down to "the cost of storage in the U.S. is high today because tank space is scarce"
But I don't really understand "wide contango at prompt", in the sense that I'd be at a loss to explain it to someone else.
Can you help me parse this clause ?
(i.e grammatical and semantic analysis or even say the same thing with a simpler sentence or more common words.)