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Gold/Mining/Energy : Strictly: Drilling and oil-field services -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: isopatch who wrote (92364)	7/16/2001 9:32:46 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 95453

<Over the VERY long term those fundamental geological concepts will dominate and produce increasing scarcity and eventually a return to higher prices due to declining reserves and production of hydrocarbons. > No, humans and their need for oil will dwindle faster than the fossil reserves. Women worldwide are having well below replacement numbers of children. In 50 years, there is going to be a big population decline. In 100 years, nearly everyone alive now will be dead [new, life-extending technology notwithstanding]. Predicting how many replacement people there will be is a WAG game. Technology will reduce the need for oil too. Newspapers will be made of pixels for example [already being done and I read newspapers via pixel]. Much of the oil used is to enable things to be done which don't require oil - oil is just an industrial age way of achieving human satisfactions. As Sheik Yamani says, the stone age didn't end for a shortage of stones and the oil age won't end for a shortage of oil [or words to that effect]. We didn't run out of hay for the horses hauling the gigs and chariots, we drive. The technology changed. Mqurice

To: isopatch who wrote (92364)	7/17/2001 10:09:17 AM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 95453

Isopatch, we differ only in what we believe is the optimum holding period for an investment. I look at a five to ten year horizon. You prefer one year or less. It's a difference in style, but I take the long approach because I believe it's almost impossible to predict shorter term fluctuations with sufficient accuracy to make the effort of being glued to a computer screen almost continuously worth while. My father also preferred long term investments. After careful study, he bought what looked like quite a mediocre investment in Newmont Mining, back in 1949. It took almost 40 years for that stock to take off. In 1987, just after the October crash, Newmont paid a $33 dividend (to defeat a takeover attempt by T. Boone Pickens), which provided my father with the largest dividend check he had ever received in his life, and more than compensated for losses in the rest of his portfolio. My father also made a small investment in a modest company called Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, back in 1934, when it came out with something called Scotch Tape. It did well for him, but for both 3M and Newmont, predicting near term gains was almost impossible. Art