Oil Panic Favors The Bold

There’s panic in the air. You can feel it.  The market for oil has been dropping daily, now trading under $85 – under $90 for Brent North Sea grades.  The headlines on CNBC are all about the turmoil, the volatility and uncertainty with investments.

It’s an environment where traders tend to shine.

I’m not going to try to predict the bottom in oil – when there’s this much panic surrounding a market, I know from experience that markets can wildly overdo what the fundamentals will tell you are the limits of market moves.  Now is the time, however, to assess those fundamentals and make some positive moves for your portfolio – moves that require some courage, to be sure.  

Every oil watcher is now predicting lower prices, $75, $65, even $50.  I’ve seen reports from Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Barron’s – even the very small and elite PIRA energy group of energy consultants – looking for much lower prices from here.

But this is what I see:  There’s panic based upon a belief that the EU is headed into a full-blown recession, that Chinese data points indicate that the bubble there is about to burst, that interest rates are about to rise here in the US, immediately and certainly not slowly.  I don’t believe any of those things are happening.

Sure, stock prices were inflated and needed a correction.  But the talk in the market is of more than…