I'd like to comment a bit on your investment troubles. Understand that a transition to real post peak pricing i.e ever shrinking economy and ever higher commodity prices is a big jump from where we are today.

Think about it every year everyone is going to have to allocate more and more of their income to just effectively staying alive. This is something that only really happens during economic collapse and war. But in our future this will be the normal economy. Sure renewable energy and all kinds of other schemes with various probabilities of success will be suggested and tried but at some point we will face the fact that for a long time we will be poorer every year.

Thats the near term big picture and its the only one you can be fairly sure of if you believe in peak oil.

It makes sense that the transition will be bumpy and the one thing you cannot do using fundamentals is time the market.
I know since I do my bet to do exactly that. However it does mean that a position that goes agianst the fundamentals is temporary i.e eventually the market will be forced if required to follow fundamentals. A great example is the stock market its been in lala land for decades. Technically economic growth in the US should have been minimal since the 1980's. However oil is consumed every day its not stored for long. So there are real physical limits on how long oil prices will not fall back to fundamentals which simply means that oil sells for more than it costs to produce and demand exists for oil at that price.

Now I will tell you what I see right now for the market as best I can. Oil has a very high probability of hitting 30 a barrel over the next few weeks and it still has a high probability of hitting 160 by the end of the year. There is a chance that the 160 target may move out to Feb or March it really just depends on when oil really bottoms out.

But I will say my fundamental analysis with everything I can put together points toward a breathtaking move soon.
Now you can try and trade on that potential volatility if you want but good luck.

The reason is the only way oil can go to 200 or more a barrel is simply if no one believes the move is long term.
That may sound weird but markets are actually fantastic computers. For the market to make the move it needs to make to transition society into the real post peak spiral it has to literally fake out all the participants.
This means it has to tell a whopper of a lie once everyone except a few fringe fanatics believe the lie then the market will move. If that means going to 30 so it can go to 200 then thats what it will do.

Underlying all of this is in my opinion the fact that most of the remaining oil to be extracted actually has a real negative EROEI. High prices resulted in less energy making it out of the oil industry not more. Projects like the tar sands where consuming more then they where producing for example. The only way out was for the energy industry to stop spending money on projects which where net negative. This means in had to begin shrinking.

A way to think about this is that the rest of the economy was the real driver of energy use and once the energy industry began consuming more then it was producing the rest of the economy had no choice but to force the energy industry to shrink since it was no longer increasing the net available energy. The pie is now shrinking but the energy industry must take less and less of the pie if you will.

The way this could happen or this signal become transmitted is practically infinite. I actually expected that the route would be the energy industry would be nationalized and stripped of its profits and the exporters forced to deal with the governments of the importing countries. I.e no free market for oil. I'm pretty sure Nate Hagens also expects this to happen and it may very well eventually happen.

If you recall the obscene profits of the energy companies brought this possibility up. But whats important is that fundamentals require the energy industry to stop growing. It says nothing about the route this takes. In the post peak world the price signal needs to maximize the amount of energy used by the rest of the economy outside the energy industry. Generally this means starving the energy industry even if it means some marginal barrels will not be extracted.

The path it actually takes is pure guesswork but the oil industry itself had to begin shrinking as we entered the post peak regime. Think of it like this you have a land initially full of trees and you have logged most of them. At first you employed 1000 loggers but eventually as you get to the bottom you have no choice but to fire some of them you simply don't need them. And yes you may end up leaving a few trees but tough.

The fact that the market decided to take the route of a price crash is interesting and not unlike what happened when the US oil industry became unsustainable post US peak so it as precedent.

But this is what fundamentals are telling me. This price event is very temporary and its simply the route the market took to force the oil industry to shrink.

Once we transition then I suspect we won't see this approach used all that much i.e I suspect we won't see a crashing price used to maximize the amount of energy used by the non-energy industry. I suspect we will see what we though would happen in the first place which is more and more of the energy market socialized. Exactly what happens probably depends on if the energy industry took the hint and will produce the most oil it can for the lowest price it can. If this means it effectively does zero reinvestment fine. Its a balance but you can be sure the moment the Energy industry tries to grow in the future this growth will be smashed somehow.

"However, not all is joy and happiness like a sunny home and a cool bicycle, for me there is a dark side also: some of my 401K decisions have been the result of drinking to much Kool-Aid here. When investing in the energy sector, I tried to stick with solid, dividend paying energy stocks and ETFs - along with alternate energy ETFs. All of the above have been sliced in half or worse. Hopefully, they will come back - but that does not ease the pain of knowing what they could be bought for today. My mental stumbling block was, as you say, the "strenght of belief" that $40 oil would never return."

You need to use BOTH fundamental analysis (belief?) AND technical analysis to trade?

Fundamentally you believed that oil would continue to stay high...but technical timing would have gotten you out in order to save some of your gains.

Buy and hold is a kind of trading...where you simply....don't have an exit plan? But all in life is CYCLICAL?

Many share your pain for sure?

Right now energy is one of the sectors showing good relative strength...so it will be back.