Rebounder

How Do You Buy Spot Oil?

Overall, very informative article on the mechanics of tradiational oil ETFs, which contrast the complete lack of analysis on the potential risk of UOY and DOY. Investors need to explore the following issues in detail before blindly switching to these vehicles vs the traditional ETF:

1) Sponsor risk - marcoshares: are they likely going to be around in a few years (at least until 2013) and if so are there significant credit risk? This is especially significant if you look at their market cap - UOY only a 5 million usd market cap.

2) Management fees - these will undoubtedly eat into the return, eroding tracking accuracy. Also, relating to point #1, these barely have any market cap so what's the incentive for managers to stick around?

3) Volumne - there is barely any volume on these vehicles. Out of 1.7 mil shares outstanding, only 15,000 traded on Mar 26.

Look a little closer and one realizes that these may be high risk vehicles which may carry other issues, outweighing the tracking errors of the traditional ETFs.

On Treasury Issuance and Interest Rates

This analysis may prove to be too simplistic. One has to consider - who were the buyers of treasuries back in '40s and '50s? I bet majority of them are domestic, even households... remember the time when the government encouraged households to purchase war bonds?

Now comes to 70's into the 80's... foreign buyers as % of total have increased significantly, and yes, they have options other than getting a 2-3% yield from US government, much as they will now in due course. Also, as the fed turned on the printing press in the 70's and 80's, it essentially reduces the real value of debt, cause the debt to gdp ratio to drop. Buyers recognize that and thus inflation expection shot up and everyone flees the USD and treasuries. We have the same forces building up right now...

The Citigroup / Gold Ratio

absolutely waste of time to read this garbage article

Seth Klarman's Best Ideas (for Now)

What's the arthur smoking? does he know anything about value investing?? Security Analysis was written by Benjamin Graham, not Klarman. Klarman wrote Margin of Safety. Pls go to the library once in a while, or you can simply get your sources right from the web.