Stocks in oil is one thing (those companies have revenue streams other than oil and are primed to invest in alternative fuels too). Putting money in Oil as a commodity and playing the futures market is another story.
I have not stopped buying oil STOCKs and even in the late 90's when oil bottomed out, oils stocks still were a nice part of my portfolio.
As a rule, I don't play with futures or commodities cause I don't have enough money to even begin to play around and feel comfortable doing that in those markets. Same goes for Coffee, orange juice, etc. Too much manipulation in those markets and always has been. Unreasonable euphoria and panic can make/break an investment with no solid data behind the trends.
If you don't mind monitor stocks on a weekly basis or have a broker that can do text alerts or does cheap stop/limit trades then maybe you should do something like I do.
I do short term trading, no day trading, but short term. It's hard to sell stocks in lots of more than 5000 shares at a time on the market that the general public has access to. So I take a starting amount say $1000 for easy math and find stocks that I can buy that will appreciate soon and keep me under the 5000 share ceiling that seems to exist when selling to the general market.
Find a stock that you think can go up 20% or in a short time, maybe a week or so (there are lots that do this and no they are not penny stocks). When it goes up 20%, sell it.
Take the new amount $1200 - fees and invest in a new stock that you think will go up. When it does sell it.
etc etc etc
Sure not all go up 20%, but if you buy on a Monday each week and sell when it goes up 20% or just sell on Friday even if it's up 4% or 12% you easily make a good return. Sure some even go down and maybe you sell at a loss or even wait a couple more days to see what happens. On average, I make 40-50 trades a year, little less than 1 a week and I don't get rich overnight, but it does pay the bills. There are other things to be careful when doing lots of short term trading, too many to get into here, but the biggest one for me and most is to make sure you don't keep flipping the same few stocks over and over, gotta make sure you keep looking into new stocks.
My motto in this strategy to keep me from getting greedy is: No such thing as bad appreciation; Never go back to see what the stock did after you sold it.
