Category archives: Industry Sector

Image credit: Martin Good / Shutterstock.com

If the first few days of the year portend what’s to come, 2016 is looking awfully gloomy for the stock market.

Stock prices around the globe fell relentlessly in January and that downward momentum was carried into mid February. By February 12, the stock market had fallen by more than 20% from the peak it achieved in the summer of 2015, which by definition means the stock market has become a bear market (i.e. a market in which prices consistently go down).

Although most sectors of the stock market ...

Image credit: Kyrien / Shutterstock.com

At the beginning of every month, I brief members on how MoneyGeek's regular portfolios have performed and comment on the state of the financial markets. In this update, I’ll explain the reasons why oil and gas stocks are featured in MoneyGeek's portfolios, but mining stocks aren't.

Performance of Regular Portfolios

The performance of MoneyGeek's regular portfolios for the month of November 2015 were as follows:

Disclosure: I have no position on ZEB, but I do own a couple of put options on 2 major Canadian banks.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many people who manage their own investments, and I’ve found that a great number of them favour holding stocks of Canadian banks.

It’s easy to understand why. We Canadians feel that our banks will always make money. Unlike the situation in the U.S., we don’t have thousands of banks, both large and small, trying to take market share away from one another. We have the Big Five banks, whose ...

Natural Gas: This cheap source of energy will eventually become more expensive, so does that mean we should invest in natural gas ETFs?

In a previous post, I talked about the reason why natural gas is extremely cheap right now. In the post, I also talked about the traditional 6:1 natural gas to oil ratio. Just to recap, historically, 6 mmbtus of natural gas traded at roughly the price of 1 barrel of oil. The reason is simple: 1 barrel of oil has roughly the same energy content as 6 mmbuts.

In the past, whenever the prices deviated ...

Fracking: This new technique to extract oil and gas is having a profound effect on the North American economy. But what exactly is it?

Today, natural gas is dirt cheap.

Take a look at this chart. 10 years ago, natural gas was trading around $5/mmbtu. It went all the way up to $$13 in 2008, but today, it sits at around $3.5. That's about 30% lower than what it was 10 years ago, and a whopping 70% lower than it was 5 years ago.

What gives? Fracking, that's what.

In this post, I'll explain ...