How to buy barrels of oil

The average price of WTI crude oil was $57 per barrel in 2019 compared to $64 in 2018.

Oil Market Investment Options

One simple way for the average person to invest in oil is through stocks of oil drilling and service companies. In addition, investors can gain indirect exposure to oil through the purchase of energy-sector ETFs.

Oil and gas exchange-traded funds (ETFs) offer investors more direct and easier access to the often volatile energy market than many other alternatives. While there is the potential for significant returns by investing in the oil and gas sector, the risks can be high.

The single biggest risk in ETFs is market risk. ETFs are only a wrapper for their underlying investments. So if you buy an S&P 500 ETF and the S&P 500 goes down 50 percent, nothing about how cheap, tax efficient or transparent an ETF is will help you.

Investing in Oil Indirectly

Other ETFS that track the oil and gas drilling sector are the SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (XOP), the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production Index Fund (IEO), and the Invesco Dynamic Energy Exploration & Production Portfolio (PXE).

If you want to invest in oil with little money, the best place to look is probably your brokerage account. With the new advent of no-fee stock trades at all of the big brokerage houses, you can buy shares of stock without worrying about fees cutting into your investment.

There are 1.65 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves in the world as of 2016. The world has proven reserves equivalent to 46.6 times its annual consumption levels. This means it has about 47 years of oil left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves).

What happens if an ETF goes to zero? If you had invested in an ETF and its price dropped all the way to zero, you’d basically lose your entire investment. As all of the companies that were held by the fund likely will have gone bankrupt there would be no value left, no dividend payments, and no capital.

Leveraged ETFs (which generally contain options or futures) are the ETFs where you can lose a lot of money in a hurry (and with no particular prospect for recovery). Even when there is no crisis or market crash, you could lose half (or all) of your money in a week.

That said, if you’re truly interested in diversified, “buy and hold” investing over the long term – and most small, individual investors should be – then ETFs could be safer than stocks in some important ways. ETFs can be affordable. Index ETFs outperform active managers. When ETFs are not safer than stocks.

There are many ways an ETF can stray from its intended index. That tracking error can be a cost to investors. Indexes do not hold cash but ETFs do, so a certain amount of tracking error in an ETF is expected. Fund managers generally hold some cash in a fund to pay administrative expenses and management fees.

My recommendation is to go with the Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Small-Cap ETF, a fund that tracks the performance of the FTSE Global Small Cap ex US Index, which consists of over 3,000 stocks in dozens of countries.

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) are ideal for beginner investors due to their many benefits such as low expense ratios, abundant liquidity, range of investment choices, diversification, low investment threshold, and so on.

Holding period:

If you hold ETF shares for one year or less, then gain is short-term capital gain. If you hold ETF shares for more than one year, then gain is long-term capital gain.

Like mutual funds, ETFs pool investor assets and buy stocks or bonds according to a basic strategy spelled out when the ETF is created. But ETFs trade just like stocks, and you can buy or sell anytime during the trading day. Short selling and options are not available with mutual funds.