WWYD right now with the likelihood that oil is about to take a big jump upwards?

 

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With my own money.....Not try to guess at market timing and stay away from Wall Street gambling.


With other people's money....Convince them the market fundamentals make the next movement obvious to brilliant people like myself, get their money and charge them a fee, leverage up and spin the wheel.

I was thinking it'd be a great time to buy into some options in oil right now... like today. Have you dabbled in futures at all?

 

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Unless you are hedging some kind of commodity risk, you are just gambling. As an investment its a terrible idea. If you have money to burn and want to gamble on futures instead of say taking a vacation to Las Vegas, thats fine.


Just be careful, trying to outguess the market is dangerous over the long term. Unless of course you have insight into non-public information that would move petroleum prices once it becomes known.


I do have experience with commodity markets. Out of school I worked at an asset management firm (individuals/trusts paying us to invest their money), after that I briefly moved to commodity hedging (mid-sized companies mostly paying us to hedge their oil/gas risk) before leaving the financial industry for greener pastures.


There are no easy home runs out there. If you think you found one, you are just ignoring the level of risk you are taking on. If you are getting free research/advice from somewhere, just realize the entire market already has this advice and question why they are giving this away for free instead of making the killing they are promising you can make. If you are doing the research yourself, realize 99.9% of the other people in the market have a much larger research staff (or a bigger bank of computers) than you do.

I've gotta agree with most of the sentiments before mine... plus a couple.

Oil is... on the whole... gambling. Unless you like taking wild chances with money you could lose... don't trade oil. Even then I'd advise taking your money to Vegas and playing an odds-predictable game like Blackjack.

Oil has major swings in short periods and can crush you if you trade it on leverage. You're not an institutional investor who can write off leveraged trading in oil or stockpile it by the tanker, so don't trade oil on leverage.

Oil almost requires you to trade it via options and stops, so unless you are a master of these... don't trade it.

Oil requires a fast trading platform, daily research, and a near-constant ability to 'day trade' it. You cannot buy it and expect to leave it to a couple automated triggers or once-a-day rebalancing. So if you can't do these things... don't trade oil.

Even most pros or day-traders who trade in oil don't generally trade in JUST oil. They are using it to hedge something else or trim out a broader portfolio. I wouldn't trade oil for the sake of oil.

When you trade oil, you're almost always trading oil futures. There are crazy contango moves and end-of-period adjustments that happen constantly which are totally contrary to fundamental or chart analysis, so unless you understand what the hell I just said in this sentence... don't trade oil.

On the whole, pretty much nobody on this board should be trading oil for the sake of trading oil. I don't think Rosie trades it heavily, either.

 

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Rosaria apparently doesn't even realize the money she makes off currency trading is at the expense of someone else, so I would very much hope she isn't doing any sophisticated trading.


Huge, don't fall for this crap. A lot of the trading system makes money by taking unsophisticated players like you, convincing you you know something, and then taking you to the cleaners because you don't. The more sophisticated traders depend on boobies feeding money into the system because there's no way any of them could beat the market overtime if the market was only made up of sophisticated players.