Book Review: The Oil Factor
Title: The Oil Factor
Author: The Leebs (Stephen and Donna)
Rate: 4 / 5
Price: RM 35
For a book with a word ‘oil’ on it, i was expecting something about drilling, deepsea, oil depletion and probably new ventures or what not. However the book has brought me to another perspective of practical investing strategy. Despite its ‘misleading’ title, it is still convenient for both investors and anyone who is interested to know about oil, gas and anything that revolve around it, as how i would describe the book.
Towards the end of your reading, you will actually realized that the author has brilliantly created an indicator and a set of portfolio that is conservative, yet profitable for your investment strategy. It is also interesting to see the results of utilizing the ‘oil indicator’ in his previous book when switching the portfolio weightage during deflation and inflation. Perhaps this book is meant within the direction of US stocks but the concept of energy influence in economic activity is everywhere. Said that, we are and will always be driven by US dollar for as long as our foreign reserve (now at USD90 billion) is on USD.
The earlier chapter explained about alternatives or renewable energy, i.e. air, nuclear, hydrogen, coal - more academic and dry subject; but that leads to the explanation of why oil has never failed to become significant. However, that data used in the analysis is for the past 30 years, of which the Mainland China was not visible as the future economic prowess; at that point of time.
The bottom line is, it is worth reading despite being less intriguing as compared to Freakonomics; for someone who is interested to understand about the future of alternative energy and for some individual investor with a capital of probably more than RM 50k, given that the portfolio is very much exclusive to blue chip companies.
