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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (36099)	7/24/2005 12:41:58 PM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 306849

<what are you referring to. how do you know oil is in a bear market (look at your quote below where you claim nobody can know what the market is doing). it is very strange to call something that has quintupled in five years a bear market. Given a long enough time frame trends are too obvious to miss. Commodities, especially energy related commodities have been falling in real terms for a few thousand years. I said it was in a cyclical bull, which more than accounts for the five year rise. It's a bull phase in a larger bear market. The reason price has risen is because it was so low and falling for so long that the profits from selling oil were not enough to replace or improve the capital equipment needed to process it at rising consumption levels as well as employ energy saving technologies. All this is solved by higher price. Once the economy makes the Patakin adjustment oil is back where it belongs, declining in comparison to other factors of production. Population growth and energy use is insidious in it's forward march but so is efficiency in energy use as well as the collective world wealth needed to produce energy. How else could populations that 20-30 years ago were too poor to use any oil now have access to it now? The fastest growth in energy use is in countries which 20 years ago people argued would never be wealthy enough to afford the price. i don't think i'm speculating in oil, anyways. if somebody owns a restaurant, are they speculating in food services? if you own a house, are you speculating in RE? i think speculation is determined by leverage relative to portfolio, more than anything (also, wasting assets such as long calls are obvious speculations). The way I define (you may have your own definitions) the difference between speculation and investing is that someone who invests hopes to benefit in the change in value of the underlying investment (whether up or down) whereas a speculator tries to cash in on the fluctuation in price regardless of the changes in underlying value. Leverage is never a determining factor for deciding which are speculations and which are investments, just a factor in determining risk and return. Money has a cost, whether it's your money or OPM. Many investments are made with leverage and many speculations are made with one's own cash. I never once borrowed money for a lottery ticket but only the most optimistic would call it an investment. All investments have some degree of speculation (including your restaurant owner) but not all speculations are investments. if you really believe that why don't you just invest in index funds for equity investments, because you believe in EMH One can not know what the market as a whole should be doing and still find prudent individual investments. Have you not proven that with your energy related stocks? who gets to decide what work is? Work doesn't have to be for money to be work. I could care less the length of someone's hair, but it is hard to ignore that people who receive guaranteed incomes are frequently seduced into living lives which are far less constructive than those who, by necessity, are forced into working for a living. People don't reach when they have money, they reach trying to get money. It is the reaching which forces people to find better more ingenious ways of doing things, to think about what could be and to expand their limitations. Unfortunately there are very few people who make significant personal progress after their 30s.