What I’m reading today …

The New Face of Oil ETFs

MacroMarkets new paired oil ETFs launched last week, replacing the previous oil ETFs (UCR and DCR) that were liquidated in June after reaching their termination triggers. Unlike the popular United States Oil (USO), these paired ETFs hold cash instruments and transfer funds between each other, instead of holding oil futures contracts. The paired ETFs will track the price of crude on the NYMEX, and will transfer funds dollar-for-dollar with the price of crude. The securities will use a “reference price” of $100 crude, and the funds NAV at inception is one quarter of the reference price. The funds have a 95 basis point expense, for essentially holding cash.

What People Spend Their Tax Rebates On When They’re Too Broke to Drive

This isn’t “new”

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It looks like a few more institutions have caught on to my thesis of farmland as fantastic investment opportunity, which I began proposing this winter [Jun 5: NYTimes: Farmland is Gold, So Billions Invested in Farming]. This is a sea change - hard assets having more value than stupid "financial innovations" of a debt laden, credit based society. We're going old school.If I had a way to buy futures contracts on farmland I'd be buying that too. And yes I am very serious. I think values for farmland across the world are going to rocket in the next decade.The way things are going, within a decade farmland is going to have more value than ocean front property.I've said in the past if there was an easy instrument to purchase farmland, I'd like to be in it. Even more ...