Hold Out On Those Long Term Stock Picks

It’s not quite time for a victory lap, but some credit should come from an oil market that has clearly seen its lows and has taken some of our beloved oil stocks on a big ride north with it. And with that credit may come some ideas about where we go hunting for the next good energy idea.

This week has seen some very famous oil ‘pundits’ take it on the chin for calls they made at the depths of the oil market in February. Dennis Gartman might be the most famous, recanting his calls earlier this year: In December of 2015 the “commodity king” appeared on CNBC saying that fossil fuels were going the way of ‘whale oil’; Further in January he opined that “crude oil would never trade above $44 in my lifetime”. Even then, I tweeted that “Dennis must be planning on dropping dead this year”.

It hasn’t taken nearly that long – less than 4 months to see oil above $45 a barrel. But Gartman was hardly alone: Pundits everywhere were calling for oil to touch $20 or even $10, and names hardly need be mentioned – if they had an outlet, they were almost limitlessly bearish, and not one expected to see any kind of significant rally towards $50 at least until the end of the year. In contrast, I was one of the few to continue to recommend independent E+P’s to subscribers and scale in myself to several as oil broke $40, $35, and even adding (an admittedly less amount) when oil broke under $30.

Now…