I don't see a bottom in February. Still *way* too much inventory and production. We are at least 9 mos. to a year out before prices begin rising again, IMHO.

Note what I said in #174.

Iran will be back in 2016 so expect the oil glut to only increase.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...s-hopes-for-big-cash-flows-as-sanctions-lift/

 

Gee, when I said that I expected to see gas prices fall below $3/gal and that I wouldn't be surprised if they fell below $2/gal, I was called all kinds of names and told that neither of those would ever happen again.

 

150,000 oil industry layoffs in Texas so far. If oil hits around 20 a bbl then there will be more.
I've managed to hang on through 3 layoffs so far. I doubt I'll make through the next one though.
That being said; if that is the price to put all those petrol OPEC nations in a bad financial situations, then I'll do it just to watch them scream and bleed oil money till they have nothing but sand and each other to eat.

 

http://www.fox5ny.com/news/76795410-story

A station in Michigan selling gas for $0.78!!

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...kota-crude-oil-that-s-worth-less-than-nothing

Oil is so plentiful and cheap in the U.S. that at least one buyer says it would need to be paid to take a certain type of low-quality crude.

Flint Hills Resources LLC, the refining arm of billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch’s industrial empire, said it would pay -$0.50 a barrel Friday for North Dakota Sour, a high-sulfur grade of crude, according to a list price posted on its website. That’s down from $13.50 a barrel a year ago and $47.60 in January 2014.

 

Wish I had some risk money. You can buy Jan. 2016 for $54 a barrel. The futures prices think it's going up, but not like it came down.

Glad now I didn't have any loose money!

 

Ain't that the truth.

The only time that I really had a desire to dump some risk money into the market was back when the market crashed in 2007/2008. I had most of my retirement money in SIRI at the time and had bought at about $3.50/share on average. It was up over $4.10/share when the bubble burst and I rode it all they way down to $0.05/share. At some point along the way I decided that I had lost so much that I might as well ride it all the way in the hopes that it might recover (knowing that there was a good change that it would go under instead). That turned out to be a good decision since it did finally recover back to above my average buy-in price. But when it was at the low I was desperately trying to find a few thousand dollars to throw at it and just couldn't scrape anything together. If I could have put $5000 in at the low where I was trying to get in that would have ended up being over $350,000 at the time I finally sold a couple years later. I did manage to buy a bit of it in the sub-50 cent range, which sure helped, but not nearly as much as I would have liked and the difference between buying in at 5 cents and buying in at 50 cents is profound.

That will likely be the only time in my life that I will have a clear opportunity to buy into something like that (where a small risk really has the potential to produce huge returns).

 

Yep went through the same thing in the same time frame. I invested in oil and technology stocks which at one point I was seeing $10,000+ gains per day! Then it all blew up so I decided to ride it to the bottom and kept pumping more money into things as they fell and fell and fell and fell some more.

I now own just over 8 million shares of stocks that are literally not worth the double digit processing fee to cash them out.

Bright side is if they somehow magically managed to ever get back up to their peaks before the crash they would be worth over $100 million.

Now that's some walking around money!

 

Yeah, one thing I often think about doing is setting up some research queries for companies that have lost at least 95% of their value and then throwing about $200 at one of them each month. That's probably the absolute upper limit I could manage to throw away at that type of shear speculation. But if just one in ten of them recovered, I'd be sitting good.

 

That strategy might appear to work in the historical data, because the ones that went under aren't in the data. It's called the "survivor bias" in portfolio theory. My hunch is that, once you factor in the risk of complete default, the strategy is no better than any other. Tough to beat the monkey and his dartboard.

I feel your pain though, Not long ago I put some money in a natural gas engine innovator and a solar company. Both have essentially disappeared. If they come out of this, it'll be great fun but I'm reluctant to throw good money after bad, as they say.

 

Yeah, to do any historical research you would have to ensure that your data included all companies listed at that time and then walk it forward. I think that data is available -- I haven't even tried to look. But if you just used a historical database of all currently-listed stocks you are bound to be in for a surprise.

I would view this as pure gambling, though hopefully with a better expected payout than PowerBall (which is pretty easy to beat -- I think burning the $2 ticket price, soaking the ashes in alcohol, and expecting them to dry out in the form of a $20 bill probably has a higher expected payout).

 

yahoo finance has historic stock pricing. I don't know if it includes those that folded.

 

There's no shortage of data these days. One just has to be very careful choosing and interpreting it.

 

How sweet it is.

 

How sweet it is.

Nice but, looks like you had $1/gal fuel savings from a loyalty club. Anyhow, I ain't complaining about $1.69 either.
What vehicle in your stable holds 16.442 gallons?

 

We bottomed out at $1.429/gal last week (no discounts). I was really hoping it would get down to $1.389/gal just because this was what local gas was when I got my driver's license in 1981. It may still happen, but prices have spiked in the last couple a days between 7 cents and 25 cents a gallon.

 

Nice but, looks like you had $1/gal fuel savings from a loyalty club. Anyhow, I ain't complaining about $1.69 either.
What vehicle in your stable holds 16.442 gallons?

Both of the local grocery chains have gas stations with fuel saving loyalty programs. Topped off the 2008 Honda Pilot 4x4 for a quick family trip. The tank only holds 20 gallons dead empty. Today's prices make me wish I still had the old sub.

 

Both of the local grocery chains have gas stations with fuel saving loyalty programs. Topped off the 2008 Honda Pilot 4x4 for a quick family trip. The tank only holds 20 gallons dead empty. Today's prices make me wish I still had the old sub.
View attachment 101502

This year I bought two 55-gallon drums. The purpose was two-fold -- first, the Beast only gets 8 mpg and it's about 20 miles round trip to a gas station. plus I have it chained up and I don't want to take the chains off until we are past the snow. So I can get enough gas to get it through the winter without taking it off the mountain. Second, we can get the most of out the rewards program by getting $1/gal discount good for up to 25 gallons. Of course, right now that means that the gas I bought earlier, at just under $2/gal, is expensive compared to what I could do now. Pay your nickel, take your chance.

 

This year I bought two 55-gallon drums. The purpose was two-fold -- first, the Beast only gets 8 mpg and it's about 20 miles round trip to a gas station. plus I have it chained up and I don't want to take the chains off until we are past the snow. So I can get enough gas to get it through the winter without taking it off the mountain. Second, we can get the most of out the rewards program by getting $1/gal discount good for up to 25 gallons. Of course, right now that means that the gas I bought earlier, at just under $2/gal, is expensive compared to what I could do now. Pay your nickel, take your chance.

So, you bought futures, and lost.

 

So, you bought futures, and lost.

No, I didn't buy futures because that would require that I made the purchase based on an expectation that the prices would be going up -- in fact I fully expected them to keep trending downward.

I purchased when I did because I had $1/gal in rewards that was going to be expiring in a few days and I had to bring the Beast down into town to pick up the drums that I had purchased and had just arrived. So combining that trip with what otherwise would have been a separate fuel tripped saved about 2.5 gallons of fuel or about $5. Saving $1/gal on 25 of the 75 gallons I purchased that day saved another $25. So that 25 gallons ended up costing about $120, or about $1.60/gal. Had I taken the Beast out last week to the station that had the $1.429/gallon and gotten 75 gallons of fuel it would have cost me $107 for the fuel plus another $11 for the fuel consumed by the Beast because the station with that price were 60 miles round tip. So the effective loss on this futures contract, even if we had looked at it from that vein, was a whopping $2 (or 2.7 cents per gallon).