<DrumBeat: December 3, 2008 The Oil Drum DrumBeat: December 4, 2008>

77 comments on The 2008 IEA WEO - Renewable Energy

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hy7awy on December 4, 2008 - 12:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

"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.

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wkwillis on December 4, 2008 - 5:00am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The stock market has fallen a lot. Have your stocks fallen farther?

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memmel on December 4, 2008 - 3:19pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Using fundamentals at all to try and time market trades makes technical analysis look like a hard science.

The one thing fundamentals cannot do well is tell you time. You can get close on volumes the shape of the curve trends etc but the absolute time is 100% hidden. Thats because of the math behind the problem.

In my opinion using fundamentals to predict time is not just a black art its shear magic. I know I try to do it.
They only way you can get it right is if you guess right on the hidden variables.

In my case I believe I'm 100% right that the Saudi surges this summer consisted of stored light Arab grades and not real oil this played a large role in smashing the oil price.

But thats not information you can get from brute force public fundamental information you have to piece it together from a myriad of sources and its the key to future oil prices.

Like I said I'd not even call it art at best its at the level of some sort of crime investigation and your trying to piece together the truth with fragments of information of dubious quality.

This single most important piece of information for me for example was the lack of asphalt from Saudi Arabia.
Like a single hair in a crime scene this was the key piece of info.

Saudi Arabia was redirecting light oil to export or storage and drawing down its strategic finished product supplies.

Edited bad year for link:

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77 comments on The 2008 IEA WEO - Renewable Energy

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