United States 12 Month Oil Fund, LP (USL) stock intrinsic value fair value estimate & owner earnings analysis

United States 12 Month Oil Fund (USL) is an exchange-traded commodity fund, not an operating business. It holds a rolling strip of twelve consecutive monthly crude oil futures contracts (the front month plus the next eleven) and keeps its remaining assets in Treasury bills and money market funds. It has no products, customers, or earning power of its own; its result each year is simply the change in the futures prices it holds, plus interest on its cash, less roughly 0.8% to 1% a year in sponsor fees and trading costs. Because those price changes are unforecastable and the fund creates no cash flow to discount, we do not value it by projecting earnings. We value it at what a unit is redeemable for: its net asset value, $33.31 per unit at December 31, 2025 (the latest audited figure available to us; it was $38.01 a year earlier, a 12.4% decline in 2025 after a 7.9% gain in 2024). Bear, base and bull cases are all set at that net asset value, because we can name and evidence no driver that makes a unit worth more or less than what it holds. Oil price moves are not something a study of this vehicle can predict, and the fund's fees are a steady drag with no offsetting earnings. For the same reason we do not set a margin-of-safety price: a unit priced at net asset value has no earnings power to be priced at a discount, so any gain would rest entirely on a rise in oil futures prices. What would make this wrong: NAV moves daily with crude oil, so the value today may differ materially from the December figure (a 2026 quarterly report was not available to us). The fund also carries structural risks: futures contract roll costs, exchange position limits, and its dependence on a single sponsor. The filing contains no going-concern warning.