Our good friend Jim Cramer went on a rant last night on Mad Money about the shortcomings on the United States Oil Fund (NYSE Arca: USO).

According to the digest at TheStreet.com: "Cramer took aim at the United States Oil ETF in particular, calling the fund simply a travesty.

Cramer said the United States Oil Fund is not what it promises. The fund does not track the price of crude as it claims. Since the fund's [inception], crude oil has fallen 23%, yet the fund is down almost twice that at 54%. Just this year, oil is up 18%, but the United States Oil Fund is down 6%. This fund has nothing to do with oil at all, he said.

Cramer said the problem with the fund is that it doesn't buy oil, and instead buys oil futures. Since oil futures expire, the fund rolls over its contracts every month,

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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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Your retirement nest egg might have lost 40% of its value since this summer and 10% the last 2 weeks. What should you do? Here's the advice I've been giving to friends who ask, as well as what I've been doing with my own portfolio.

First, let me begin by stating that I make no claim whatever to be able to predict whether stock prices will go up or down over the near term or when the market bottom might be reached. In part that humility is inspired by a large academic literature demonstrating that it's very hard to predict stock prices with formal statistical models.

The one element of predictability for which I do see some support in the academic literature is the claim that the price/dividend or price/earnings ratios do not wander too far from their long-run historical averages. The implication of that finding is that

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Here's how it was reported, for example, in the Wall Street Journal:

Reaction to the Wall Street bailout and frenzied last-minute trading in the oil market sent crude prices soaring by more than $16 a barrel, the biggest one-day jump ever.

The late-day spike, which shoved oil up 16% to $120.92 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, offered an illustration of Wall Street's hard-to-predict moves amid broad market turmoil.

And here's what really happened.

The most striking thing about yesterday's oil prices was the disparity between different futures contracts. The October contract, which expired yesterday, did indeed settle at $120.92, up more than $16. But oil for delivery in November closed at $109.27, an increase of only $6.62, and longer-forward contracts saw an even more modest increase. Unquestionably what was going on was a short squeeze, in which traders who had sold the October contract short were scrambling

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