New Financial Instrument Could Make Oil Investing More Accessible Waterville ME

Following a meeting of top energy consultants and industry experts, new action is underway that will allow everyday investors to benefit from oil's growing status as a financial asset. By establishing new exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that are open to all investors, trading in oil futures will become more stabilized and more closely tie oil's value to its status as both a commodity and an asset. See the following article from Money Morning for more on this.



Sometimes big things come from small meetings.

As an example, consider one particularly contentious 1927 session at the Royal Institute of International Affairs that took place at Chatham House in the center of London's Westminster. It originated an idea now used worldwide - the famous Chatham House Rule. Under its most recent revision (2002), the Rule allows the participants of a meeting to use the information received there, but prohibits them from revealing the identity or affiliation of anyone else present.

The Chatham Rule also governed the meetings I attended at Windsor Castle outside London from a recent Friday through to the early-morning hours of the following Monday. These meetings were the annual consultations of the Queen's Windsor Energy Group, which were meant to be private, high-level, discretionary advisories. This is one of the few "old boys" clubs left in the world where talk can translate directly into action.

Twenty-seven of us comprised the formal consultancy under the Rule. We came from around the world to meet, review the year's energy developments, and make recommendations. We stayed in the castle and held closed sessions, where some very heavy hitters hammered out the "Windsor Perspective."

About 50 other figures made up the audience at larger daytime sessions, although those individuals left the castle grounds each evening. The group included ambassadors of nine countries and representatives from five others; four British cabinet ministers; members of Parliament; officials from the Bank of England (BOE), the European Union, and the European Central Bank (ECB); as well as principals of major oil-and-gas companies.

But the real action was in the small consultancy meetings.

And here the Chatham Rule kicks in. I cannot mention the participants. I cannot give you the true flavor of the most enthralling policy debates I have ever experienced without violating the "who said what" part of the Rule.

However, I can tell you what resulted.

A strategy was worked out and recommended. It provides a new and more-direct avenue for investors to profit from what is coming. It will initially emerge in the way oil financing is worked out in London (now the leading center for such things).

And you are literally hearing about it here first.

The Oil Futures Bubble

I intended to propose at Windsor a way to improve investor prospects in the new oil environment that's forming as the financial crisis levels off. ...