Oil as a commodity is an interesting real asset. What investments most directly create the economic effect of owning oil itself?

The best answer would be to own an oil well, or better yet, own an entire oil exporting country.  However, neither of those options is a practical answer for most investors, certainly not owning a country (unless, of course you are born into the right family).

So what are the practical options for the rest of us?  Among others, they include:

futures contracts funds that invest in futures contracts exchange traded notes that are priced to a futures index royalty trusts that own oil in the ground integrated oil companies oil & gas exploration companies oil & gas production companies general energy funds alternate fuels options on any of the above.

Options are a speculation that expire in time, so we’ll exclude them from the “ownership” consideration.  Futures provide a 1:1 price participation, but they also expire with time, and rolling from

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Stewart Enterprises (NASDAQ:STEI) is the second largest provider of services in the funeral industry in the US. Laura Cadden in Today’s Financial News told readers about this stock in February. At the time, it was trading at around $6.40 a share. Since then, the share price hit $10 after the company’s larger competitor, Service Corporation International (NYSE:SCI), made a truly tempting acquisition offer.

Understanding Counter Party Risk As we write this, CNBC is reporting that Lehman Brothers, Inc. (LEH) has a notional amount of outstanding OTC positions of nearly $800 billion.  Since Lehman is going into bankruptcy, what does that mean for the rest of the financial markets? Each of these trades has a counter party, an institution that is expecting to pay off or get paid according to the terms of the agreement. Explaining Counter Parties Let us start with an example that everyone can understand.  Suppose that you occasionally make a  football bet (completely illegal) with an online sports betting service or a local provider of such services.  Since you are a recreational player, your normal unit is $100, an amount less than tickets to a local sports event.  If you lose, you have to sacrifice some fun.  If you win, you can ...