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Dr. Copper is speaking–but what is he saying?
Albert Edwards Albert Edwards of Société Générale is one of the longest-tenured strategists of global securities markets around. He’s very smart. He foresaw the problems that would result in the...
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where’s the bottom for the gold price?
falling gold The gold price has fallen steadily from a high of just under $1800 an ounce last October to the current spot price of $1231 this morning. How low can the gold price go from here?...
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the decline phase of the base metals cycle–where we are now
I started my career as a securities analyst as a generalist. I covered companies in the oil and gas, utilities, and electronics industries as I learned the trade. After I’d been working for a few...
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why commodities companies overinvest, turning boom to bust
This is a continuation of my post from yesterday. It may be that, as Chris Hackett suggests in a comment to yesterday’s post, that everyone has his head in the sand, not only commodities company CEOs...
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gold mining stocks?
gold mining stocks I spent part of the day yesterday looking at gold mining stocks. the potential attraction? …over two years of dreadful performance. Since mid-2011, the gold price is down by about a...
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natural resource production companies: proved reserves
Early in my career I interviewed for a job with a company that had brought in a new chief investment officer to revamp its research department–a job I (luckily, as it turns out) didn’t get. In the...
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natural resource production companies: accounting quirks to watch for
mining Mining is mostly about how a company develops resources that have already been discovered, sometimes very long ago. 1. Metals orebodies can vary considerably from one part ot the next in the...
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shale oil and shale gas (ii): shale oil
conventional wisdom… In recent years pre=shale oil),conventional wisdom about world oil supplies has been dominated by several ideas: –that world oil production is at, or near a peak (Wikipedia has a...
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shale oil and shale natural gas (iii): shale gas
shale gas vs. shale oil The impact of the development of shale oil deposits in the US is primarily macroeconomic and global. The effects of shale natural gas, on the other hand, are very specific to...
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North Dakota, fracking and flaring
My internet is working again!!! Oil production in North Dakota, driven by hydraulic fracturing in the Bakken shale, has risen from 400,000 barrels a day to over a million over the past three years....
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oil? ebola? the dollar?–why stock prices have been falling
In many ways, stock market commentators have an unenviable task. At any given moment they have to come up with new and interesting reasons why stocks are rising or falling. The media gurus’...
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why the oil price will continue to be weak
supply and demand In the short term (read: for now and for some vague time into the future), demand for oil is pretty constant, no matter what the price (i.e., demand is inelastic). People need to...
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crude oil (ii): what’s happening now
lower oil price+=less new drilling Sharply lower oil prices have two main effects on the planning of new drilling by oil exploration companies: –the more obvious is that they are only getting about...
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natural resources and economic growth
I ended up with my first stock market job, more or less by accident–and without any finance experience or training–in the late summer of 1978. A few months later, the firm’s oil analyst was headhunted...
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the view from Canada
Yesterday the Governor of the Bank of Canada, that country’s central bank, announced it was lowering short-term interest rates from 1% to .75% as an “insurance” measure to help the Canadian economy...
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effects of lower oil prices
At $50 a barrel oil vs. $100 a barrel: 1. High-cost alternatives hydrocarbon like liquefied natural gas (LNG), where projects require billions of dollars in spending on infrastructure–cryogenics at...
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sorting out oil-related stocks
The very large drop in oil prices over the past eight months has had negative effects on all oil-related firms. The amount of suffering varies considerably, however, based on how a given firm is...
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oil and gold: finding the commodity cycle bottom
I got my first couple of portfolio manager jobs in the 1980s because one of my industry specializations as a securities analyst was natural resources. Back then, there were an enormous number of...
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more on gold
just to clear the air I was interviewing a prominent tycoon in Hong Kong in the mid-1980s when the topic turned to gold. He told me that he had long since sold all the gold bars he had once used to...
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thinking about China: economic growth and metals
In the late 1970s, Beijing decided that its central planning model of economic development wasn’t working because the domestic economy had become too complex. It reluctantly shifted to the model Japan...
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