The price of oil
By Ben Yearsley | 24 Jul, 2008
Over the last few months as oil has relentlessly gushed upwards the price has been a constant fixture in many newspapers and news reports on TV as the doom and gloom mongers have been predicting the end of the financial world!
Not having access to a crystal ball, I have to be honest and say I have no idea whether oil will fall back to $50 a barrel or whether it will rise to $200 per barrel. What is interesting to note is that recently the price of oil has fallen back from a high of $147 a barrel on the 11th July to stand at just over $127 today – have you seen this reported on the news or in the press though?
Similar to stock market related stories, it is only the bad news that is normally ever reported, often in relation to how much money has been wiped off the market or the value of shares during that day’s trading. Very rarely do you see a headline saying “£30 billion added to value of stock market” or “oil price sharply falls significantly helping many motorists”.
At the present time markets are volatile – both the stock market and also commodities such as oil. Just because the market was down last week or the price of oil was up doesn’t mean the same is true this week. As I write this the market is up strongly today (Wednesday 23rd July) and has actually rebounded well from the lows of last week. Stock market investing is for the long term – if you have money ear marked for investment it might be an idea to think about using the bad news days to commit more money to the market and try and avoid getting too negative after reading the papers or watching the TV.
