CargoOne - Nowhere did I mention that everyone is stupid, I'm not that arrogant. All I was pointing out is that so many in management don't understand big parts of the puzzle that they play with. How do you know that I don't play the crude oil futures? Yes, I am a futures trader but not involved in the energies directly.
Agree with your rant on technical analysis though. A wide subject with many different techniques and twice as many opinions. By no means the holy grail to predicitng prices. Also agreed, its all about bets- it's just that there seems to be a lot of bad betting going on!
Guessing the fuel price is like guessing your track miles to some chaotic airport and making a subsequent decent planning. Yes, price prediciton is difficult. It's not that dis-similar to weather forcasting where really good practioners do a good job the majority of the time,as they did with Hurricane Katrina advice. Unfortunately it was the management who ballsed up with the plan.
If you gamble on a shortcut and you deliberately go below profile, then you might get rewarded or you might get screwed. It's not easy to predict the price of oil (or any other asset or commodity) in these volatile markets for any management. Even major banks and hedge funds get it wrong occasionally. - actually they get it wrong alot of the time! That is why the banking system almost failed. So many of their models are based on false assumptions and phoney statistical thinking. Most of these people still believe in simple bell curves when it comes to financial markets
p.s. the banking fiasco didn't start in 2007, but it started to unwind in 2007. The foundations for this recession were laid many years before that during the low interest rate years that followed the dot.com bubble. You could even go as far back as when Mr Alan Greenspan was given the helm - but I don't want to get into an arguement on Economic History
Last edited by juniour jetset; 8th Dec 2009 at 10:03.