Before You Get Caught up in Commodity Fever, It's Time to Take a Look at a Few Hard Facts.
By Dennis Hessler
Are you afflicted with newbie commodity fever?
Many of us know this illness. Maybe a few of you have even been taken with the fever yourselves. It's ugly and long lasting and it can make you really, really sick.
Its symptoms are an addiction to arcane, little-used trading terms, an inexplicable faith in unknown and untested trading partners, a love for long daisy chains of buyers, brokers and others claiming to be "players" in the trading marketplace and, most of all, ignorance of the give-and-take in the cutthroat business of trading in oil.
The major symptom is the glassy-eyed stare of the wanna-be trader who thinks if he can make just one cent on each gallon/barrel/drop of oil he sells, he can retire forever.
So here are a few ugly facts:
The business of trading in oil is pretty much a closed community. It is populated with many cutthroat profiteers who would just as soon watch you drown in a sea of ignorance as throw you a life ring of assistance. Many of these real traders are not only far more knowledgeable than you are ever likely to be, but they have huge egos to boot. On top of this, even if you manage to learn everything about how to trade in oil, you will soon discover that it's not what you know anyway. It's often "who" you know.
Anyone who's spent any time at all in Internet buy and sell sites and newsgroups knows that there are--each and every day--hundreds, maybe thousands, of requests to buy and sell being made by people who say they're in the oil business.
They aren't. At least not the vast majority. Most of these people are just pretenders. A few are even real oil companies testing the waters. Most, however, are just fakes and most new traders learn this the hard way. Anyone who's gotten involved in the inevitable daisy chains that are part of the online international commodity "trading" business has learned a new meaning of the term "dead end."
Here I'm talking about anyone following up on trade notices offering to buy or sell commodities like corn, wheat, sugar, cigarettes, whisky, oil, jet fuel and diesel fuel, just to name a few. If you ask participants who tried to involve themselves in these deals how much money they've made, some will tell you they've made quite a bit. Some will admit they've made nothing.
The fact is (and this is from real oil traders who know by experience) that most of these "deals" are just fake--plain and simple. Buyers and sellers of the product just don't exist. Oftentimes the deal is nothing more than words on a page or at a website from individuals who are just mischievous or, worse, crooks. There are numerous instances of fake sellers of commodities producing long-winded and arcane proforma offers who learn in the end that their "customer" is a fake jut like they are!
Thanks to the Internet, these days some phony-baloney oil brokers even have their own websites and call themselves petroleum suppliers or petroleum companies even though they may not have completed a single real oil trade transaction in their lives.
Newbies who really want to get into the business break out of this daisy-chain trap by actually taking the time and effort to learn the real business of oil industry supply and demand and go directly to the real oil company suppliers and buyers.
Dennis Hessler is an international trade consultant and publisher. He recently published an ebook available only through the Internet about lessons he's learned over the years about how to sell through the mail and over the Internet. It's called 39 MYTHS ABOUT HOW TO MAKE MONEY SELLING INFORMATION PRODUCTS OR HOW I BREAK ALL THE RULES AND MAKE THOUSANDS EVERY MONTH. Order from:
Spyglass Point Productions PO Box 13141 Pensacola, FL 32591 U.S.A. www.spyglasspoint.com Dennis@spyglasspoint.com
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