It's really very simple.
Go to any stock comparison chart today and compare the popular
United States Oil Fund, Barclay's iPath S&P GSCI Crude Oil
Fund, or PowerShares DB Crude Oil Double Long and compare these to
The United States 12 Month Oil Fund or PowerShares DB Oil
Fund. You will find that USL and DBO outperform the rest in
all long term charts - 3 months, 6 months, 1 year.
That's because of contango, the term used for the strategy of
buying the front-month futures contract and rolling it forward,
which is what all the major funds have to do in order to try and
keep in line with current crude oil future contract trading.
Remember, oil contracts priced in the future are currently more
expensive than current prices. As long as that is the case,
when the current month's futures contract expires, these funds are
forced to 'roll over' and pay a higher price for the next month's
contract. Who pays for the difference? The long term
investors who don't know any better. What makes it more
extreme (and unusual) is that a major chunk of the futures contract
volume is actually driven by the fund that's trying to follow the
contract prices.
Did you get that? It's pretty ridiculous when you think
about it: the index supposed to follow current crude oil prices
actually drives the current price.
Assuming that all this is true, it is actually the longer term
contracts that provide a more meaningful look into the value of
oil. The current contracts go all the way to the year 2017,
where traders currently predict that the price of oil will be $74
(that's, of course, laughable to those who believe we are hitting a
period of peak oil around the world).
In any case, there are two oil funds that are superior in that
they have already proven not to lose as much unnecessary dollars
when rolling from one futures contract to the next, and yet they
still follow the current price of crude: USL and DBO.
USL buys 12 months worth of contracts and rolls over all of
them, which spreads out the contango and minimizes the effect of
the price differential roll over between the current month and the
next. DBO, on the other hand, uses management discretion,
meaning they can basically buy and do whatever they want depending
on what the current futures contract situation looks like. It
has worked so far, as they are preforming in line with USL,
suggesting that they are also likely spreading their bets and
buying 12 months worth of contracts.
I'm still waiting on a fund that focuses more on late date
futures contracts only, but right now USL and DBO are the best
available. In 3 months, 6 months and 1 year, USL and DBO have
outperformed OIL and USO by around 10-20%. That's the price
you pay when you buy USO or OIL.