Thursday, April 13, 2006

Oil ETF good for Diversification

This ETF dubbed USO seems like a nice buy when you are looking for diversification but don't want to deal with the oil majors. Too bad the ticker symbol could'nt be OIL though.

Economists have shown that even though oil itself is volatile, when added in small amounts (generally under 10%) it dampens the overall volatility of a typical stock-heavy portfolio. Since volatility is the traditional measure of risk, a certain amount of oil will lower risk. Pure energy analysts probably don't see this hidden benefit because they focus on single asset classes, not portfolios.

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