People are again looking for the best way to invest in oil, as the price has bounced back from its lows.
Oil certainly tends to be one of those investments that goes in and out of fashion.
However there are legitimate reasons why you might want to invest in oil:
- To hedge the cost of petrol
- Because you think the rising price could hurt stocks
- You think supplies are running out and so it will get more valuable
- You believe inflation is a threat, so want to buy real assets
- When you were little, J. R. Ewing was your idol
I wrote recently about my growing interest in commercial property. I consider property a core holding – if bought at the right price.
Commercial property grew to wildly inflated prices during the boom, and investors who followed performance to load up at the peak have seen their property investments crash.
But that was then, and this is now.
Just a quick note to say I’ve caught up with 2009 and decided to enable comments across all posts on the site.
I’ve manually gone through and marked them all to allow comments, but if I’ve missed one out and you’ve got something burning to share on it, please do let me know.
Some interesting financial and investing posts I ran across this week, plus a few decent articles from the newspapers.
Warning: This is a long post, and it’s as much to do with politics as investing. Read at your peril!
There’s no doubt the financial crisis has cheered up anti-globalisation campaigners who had been getting dismayed with how much their countrymen enjoyed cheaper consumer goods, and how China and India seemed to be doing very well while being ‘exploited’ by the West.
The downturn has even put on a smile on the face of old, blind and illiterate idealists who’d love to dig up the corpse of communism.
I haven’t got much to say to the latter (except: get a job) but I got an interesting glimpse into the former when I attended a lecture at the London School of Economics on Tuesday to hear Professor Dani Rodrik of Harvard University.
Rodrik is a Professor of International Political Economy, and is widely considered to be a big thinker in the realm of markets, institutions and capitalism. (Click here for Rodrik’s full bio).
As I’ll discuss below, he gave some interesting insights into the problems of regulating the global economy.
But his talk also highlighted how people with an anti-free-trade agenda are going to try to hijack the financial crisis as their force majeure.
Why does this matter to you as an investor?
