Barrels Per Day - B/D

Not the answer you want when you ask a prospective romantic partner the question, "how many pickles do you eat?" But it's exactly the measure you're looking for when you ask someone about oil output.

We know what you're going to say: "when did a barrel become an accepted amount of anything?" We get it. We're all pretty comfortable with gallons and maybe liters (if we're dealing with Europeans or Canadians), but now we're going to start measuring oil (and only oil) in some arbitrary measure like "barrels." If you want to trade in mayonnaise futures, are they traded by the jar? Is cocoa traded in "mugfuls"?

We're afraid the "barrels" thing is just one of those historical quirks that comes along with having a financial market that stretches back to a time when people rode to work on horseback and wore silk socks and knee-britches. When they started using "barrels" as the accepted measure of an amount of oil, there was still farmland on Manhattan. It's just the way it is. (A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, by the way.)

If you run an oil production facility (like an offshore rig, or a field of those giant hammer-looking things that move up and down), then you measure the amount of oil you pull out of the ground in barrels per day. It's just how it goes.