Is investing in Oil/Gas a good idea? If yes how do i start. is there any website i can consult to educate?

myself about how to start investing?

I would not recommend investing in petroleum at this time, the market is very shakey. I might be good in a diversified portfolio as you may catch an upswing and then be able to dump. Commodities are a tough racket, try something a little more stable. If you want a gamble find some up and coming technical company in China, invest and then get out before the Chinese government kicks out all foreign investor. If you really want commodities trading, buy corn.

Well, sure except you have to consider that other people know that too. This means, that just "investing in Oil/gas" could lose you money. (One useful guide in the P/E. Stay away from penny stocks. PRICE OF STOCK/EARNING PER SHARE. The larger the more overvalued the stock.)

Lots of WWW sites. I recommend fools www site but some basics to consider:

If your smalll investor mutual funds or index funds might be better choice. Less risk and you get more diversity in small investment. (Less risk means less loss and less gain.)

http://www.fool.com/

You might also want to consider whether to get financial adviser. I find they are sadly more "preditory" than before but might still give good advice.

Other things to read:
- Wealthy Barber - gr8 canadian book
- Why not to invest in Mutual funds
- why to buy bonds

Well,investing in Oil/Gas may be very profitable ,especially in developing countries.But also,it's very capital intensive.

It should be alright to invest for about the next 10 years, but the world is rapidly changing and you can think of it as investing in the steam engine when most people are still using this form of transportation, however metaphorically scientific discovery is starting to discover oil, so it would be a rather short term investment (something to sell in about 6-8 years)

OK, First everything Rostov said was right. The books he picked are great ones. Give him a star or something.

Second, There are several ways to look at this, and do this.

First of all, realize that you are looking at getting on a train that left the station a couple of years ago. That's not entirely bad news, but just to make you aware, the time to get into oil and gas was back when everyone was all amazed that oil had hit $40 (or even $35). Since then it's been up to 70 and back down to $50 and now it's at $55.

The first thing to do is go get a book called THE PRIZE by Daniel Yergan. It was written by a man called Daniel Yergan back in the early 1990s. It's a long book, but an easy read. It is THE history of the Oil Industry. Before you put your money into oil, you need to know what oil is and how it works. Read the Prize and find out. If you can't be bothered to learn about what you are investing in, you shouldn't be investing.

The Prize will NOT tell you how to invest, but by the time you finish reading the book you will know how the oil buisness works and why it is the way it is. Most importantly you will understand the cyclical nature of the buisness. That is a MUST if you want to invest.

Basicly the oil buisness works like this. People use oil. People use more oil. People use so much oil it begins to get short in supply. Prices go up. Prices go up so high people start looking for more oil. People find more oil. Everyone makes oodles and oodles of money. People see them making oodles of money and they get in on the game too. Lots and lots of people find more oil. So many people find so much oil the price crashes and everyone looses their shirt. Then the bankruptcy's start. Then everyone swears they will never invest in oil again. But people keep using oil. People keep using more oil... mainly because there is so much of it on the market that it is real cheap. They use so much the price goes up and it all begins all over again. This has happened about 5 or 6 times over the past 100 years.

Right now the oil world is changing. It used to be that the USA used most of the worlds oil... so much so that the world price swung on how cold it was in New England during the winter. However now several billion Chinese and Indians have learned the joys of capitalisim and are getting rich. As they get rich they have discovered the joys of things like refrigerators and cars. The Chinese are NOT going back to riding to work on bikes in the rain while wearing Mao jackets, McDonalds just opened it's first drive thru in China. Chinese people and Indian People are buying cars and using more oil. This has resulted in increased demand for oil, and is a PART of why (a big part of why) oil is at $55 today and not $25.

There is a lot more too it than that though. Part of it is political risk. It is very hard to drill for oil in the Europe (there isn't any there) or the USA (too many enviornmentalists). This means that about the only places you CAN drill for the stuff are places you would rather not be... like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc. You may have noticed that in the Middle East there are several wars, there is a nutcase running Venezuela that is going to nationalize (i.e. steal) the oil fields, and in Nigeria terrorists keep kidnaping oil field workers and threatening to blow up the pipelines because they know the oil companies will pay them to give them their people back and not blow up the pipelines. All of this means it is possible that we could loose some part of our oil supply at any time. This is bad because the envornmentalists haven't let us drill for oil anywhere for years. This means the system is pretty darn close to full capacity at all times, If ANY part of the oil supply system goes down for a significant period of time, (lets say Iran gets the bomb and the US and/or Israel go after them and take out their oil facilities, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela does something dumb, or there is a revolt in Saudi Arabia, etc.) we are going to be hurting because since everyone is at 100% allready, nobody would be able to make up for the lost capacity. (It is sort of like a two income family that has no savings and is spending every dime they make. IF one of the two gets laid off, they are screwed.) If that happens prices will go through the roof. That is one of the reasons why oil was at 70 a few months ago. People were afraid of political instability driving up the prices. Personally I'm a big believer in human stupidity and expect something to blow somewhere sometime, but that is just me.

Political risk and supply and demand are only part of it though. Oil and gas is a complex buisness. Part of the reason oil was a $70 had to do with the market dynamics on the NYMEX (where oil futures are traded) and pension funds. Market dynamics (like what day options expire, etc.) can have as big an influence on the price as politics.

If you want to invest in oil there are several ways to do it. Some are good, some are downright suicidially stupid if you don't know what you are doing.

One of the safer ways is to find an oil company you believe in and buy its stock. You could go with a big one, like Exxon/Mobil, or you could go for a wildcatter, or you could go for Oilfield services (folks like Haliburton who do the geological survey work and supply the trucks and rigs, etc.). Before you buy any stock though, find out how the market works. The best way is to just watch CNBC every morning and listen close, and then watch Jim Kramer's show on CNBC at night. As time goes on you will learn alot. Kramer's books are very good too, but I havent' read them. Getting the Wall Street Journal is a great way to learn what you should be doing too.And remember DIVERSIFY, DIVERSIFY, DIVERSIFY.

Another way is to buy into an existing oil field. There are deals put together by venture capitalists who are buying properties where oil is either being produced or (they think) could be produced. The city of Fort Worth Texas is sitting on a huge gas field (the Barnett Shale). There is a lot of gas down there, but it wasn't untill recently that technology made it possible to get it out, and the price got high enough it was profitable to get it out. The Barnett Shale play is becoming legendary as people are getting leases from homeowners... there is a Fayettville Shale play going on in Arkansas right now too. If you aren't a geologist this can be VERY risky.

Another way to invest in oil is to buy futures and options. This is the SUICIDALY STUPID thing to do, unless you are a professional options trader. Options are VERY complex, and amatures tend to get eaten alive. (This is why Hillary Clinton's "cattle futures" trades were so obvioulsy fraudulent. The odds of someone doing what she (supposedly) did in a futures market, especially someone who wasn't a professional trader, are roughly the same as going to the best golf course in Georgia and hitting a golf ball and getting a hole in one on the best golf course IN SCOTLAND.) There are people who run late night infomercals about how they can teach you how to trade options. The books and classes they sell make it possible for dentists and retired guys to loose a lot of money, but not a whole lot else.

So yes, you have a good idea. First though, go do your homework. Read THE PRIZE. Read one of Jim Kramer's books. Watch CNBC. Read the Wall Street Journal. Then after you know what is going on, go find a broker and talk to them about what you want to do, what sort of risk you are willing to take, how much you have to invest, what your investment goals are. Since you will have done your homework first you will know if the guy knows his stuff or not. If he knows his stuff decide then and there what you want to do.

Don't worry. No hurry. The oil market will still be here in a couple of months. Take the time to know what you are doing. You can make a lot of money in oil. You can also loose it all overnight. More than a few people have done both, several times.

And ignore that guy who wants to sell you old Iraqi dinars. That's a rip off scam disguised as currency trading.

Good luck!

I would look into investing in Fuel Cell research. It's not big now, but it shows promise. It's probably what will run all cars someday, getting rid of the need for gas.

There are two ways to invest. One is stocks in companies that produce oil. There are a few different kinds of companies in this field.

The other way is buying futures.

If you are a beginning investor you need to read some books on investing. Women tend to be better investors than men. So read a book by a woman and increase your potential for success.

You can get them from the library for free. From the web for about $6 if they are returns (just like new).

Next, I would recommend reading the Elliot Wave Theory. It measures indexes. You may be surprised what the Elliot theorists have to say about oil and investing in it. There is a web site but read the book first to get an overview.

YouвЂ™re not ready yet. Next read the Innovators Solution by Clayton Christensen. It explains about market disruptions. It will give you the blueprint for knowing which type of business could enjoy explosive profits.

YouвЂ™re still not ready. Add to all of this the reasonable factor. What is that? Look at what happened to the whale oil industry. It no longer exists. Why? What replaced it? If you think in this way, you can decrease your risk and increase your potential to profit from the market.

Oil sounds like a gloom and doom profit maker. In reality it is a gloom and boom profit maker as new energy disruptions enter the market.

Oil is poised to be disrupted just like Bethlehem Steel and other giants who no longer exist.

Sure, for the long term. I suggest that you diversify with a no-load mutual fund such as T. Rowe Price New Era Fund -- they've an excellent record and are a very credible organization. You can locate T. Rowe Price Funds very easily with a Yahoo Search. You can also go to Morningstar for ratings on funds. Good luck.

Yes it is. Get connected with an investment specialist.

I can't answer your question directly but, think about this. You want to invest in Oil or Gas? Have you thought about buying Iraqi Dinar? There is tons of hype on it all over the internet and most of it is probably bs. You will see people selling Dinars on Ebay spouting off about the Dinar being valued at $3.82 right after the first Gulf War ended and their belief that it will return to that soon. After this they remind you that you can current buy 1 million Dinar for an inflated Ebay price of $900 to $1200, and that Dinar are only valued at .00077 U.S. cents each right now. Pretty simple to do the math here. Buy 1 million Dinar for $1000 and if they are right and it returns to the '91-'92 rate of one Dinar being worth $3.82 USD you would have $3,820,000. Not bad for a $1000 investment. What they leave out is that Saddam is the one you said "this is my country..this is my dinar..I say it is worth $3.82 USD. No where else in the world was it valued higher than 32 cents.

The bad/good news here is that the new currency belongs to a new country. Iraq isn't what it used to be and isn't ran by the old government. Therefor the currency isn't going back to where it was. At the same time, now the U.S. has a particular interest in making that country work so there might be a chance.

My advice is to do like I did. By only a little bit. Don't invest any more than you are willing to lose completely...then hold onto it for five or ten years. When that time has gone buy you will either have a handful of useless paper..a pile of near worthless paper valued at the same thing you paid for it..or a nice little wad of cash if every politician in Washington has been buying Dinar for them self did their very best to ensure Iraq's economy became strong and their currency became strong. That is why I bought some..not because I trust the competence of Iraq's new government but, because I trust the greed of our own politicians.

The short answer is yes. Oil is a finite resource, so as the world population increases so does it's consumption of natural resources. A true shortage is far on the horizon (20-30) years, and their are risks of new energy sources replacing traditional oil; but the laws of supply and demand will ensure oil prices to raise in the mid to longer term.

You can buy (or short) oil in an ETF or index very easily. They trade like regular mutual funds. Yahoo Finance has excellent research and learning tools. I work in an investment house and still use it all the time.

To start investing i suggest mapping out a savings plan and setting up a "phony" money portfolio on yahoo or other free site. Try your stock picks there first, and as you study them and educate yourself (by reading the 10k etc) you will learn alot.

Stock picks are NOT easy, it is sometimes very complicated and the markets move very fast, so until you are comfortable picking them on your own, perhaps it's best to consult a professional.

Remember, diversification is your friend. Don't put all your eggs in one basket and read everything on a companies website (especially under the Investor Relations tab) before you buy.

Happy Hunting

Yes it can be, like any investment. You would need to speak to a financial advisor or investment advisor. Alternatively you could visit a stockbroker.

oil and gas is a "sector" and as such holds special risks. It is a commodity play. Within the last year, oil was at $78 / barrel, now it is Around $56, That is a big swing in price and stocks are more volatile than the commodity.

If you want to start out investing, read and learn everything about markets, but start investing by putting your money into a "balanced" mutual fund at your bank.

It has far less volitility and is much safer than sectors.

not realy you have to wait a long time to get your money back but if you cant wait then go in to bonds better money thankx

Exxon Mobil (They sell Oil and Gas) are the most profitable company in the World.

Open a brokerage account at TD Ameritrade and drop me a line.

HMMM PERHAPS YOU SHOULD ASK BUSH.....HE'S THE OIL EXPERT.. LMAO

Personally I would stay away from investing in Oil/Gas. It is very capital intensive work with many risks. With the stock market looking like it is do for a correction. The value of the dollar falling, maybe Gold would certainly be safer then oil at this time.

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