Gas Is Cheap
The price of gasoline is on everybody's mind, it seems. I've never had so many complete strangers talk to me while filling up my tank.
But the price of gas hasn't really bothered me. I lived in Romania over 10 years ago and the price of gas there was about $1.00 per liter or $4.00 a gallon. In a country where the average wage was $100 per month, that WAS expensive.
In London in 2000 I paid nearly 5 bucks a gallon and my friend in Ireland says that gas is now over $9.00 per gallon.
We're a whiny bunch, and we really should focus on how good we really have it. Sure gas is more than it used to be, but life is still good, we're all more rich than 99% of the world, and we're still paying less for gas than most of the world.
For more on the price of gas, MSN has a good article tonight.
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7 comments:
The problem is the we are leveraged more than 99% of the world. Savings in general are very low as many have pursued consumerism. I do agree with you that we are lucky however and likely the readers of your blog are savers/investors.
I don't pay too much attention to gas prices, although the higher prices and weaker dollar does have a cascading affect on everything we consume.
I would like to point out that the US has the lowest taxes on gasoline out of the countries you mentioned. Actually the US taxes on gas are about 1/3 of most European countries.
the old saying is to go away in may....the market is looking for a pullback I think. Does anyone have backtesting on May - August following Zweig? I must admit that losing almost 10% for the week on my investment (only 5% of my whole portfolio, however) has me nervous to go in again on the ZWEIG RS top 5 right now, but I don't want to miss out on any gains either, of course.
Thanks,
Matt
Based on backtest done on Keelix of Zweig-26; monthly hold, from 12/28/01 to 5/16/08 in avg pct return:
June July Aug
NASDAQ 0.9 0.1 -3.1
S&P500 0.8 -0.5 -2.0
Zweig-26 1.9 2.9 -5.1
I expect a tough summer already and may now spend all of August doing research...
FYI: Sep, Apr and Nov have the highest average returns under Zweig based on a limited sampling.
I posted an article last year about selling in May. I based my numbers on monthly rebalancing of the Zweig screen.
http://stockpunk.blogspot.com
/2007/04/screening-for-seasonality.html
Thanks sc and Scott.
Great article from last year Scott. I appreciate that you did the backtest on your numbers for those periods.
I keep hearing comparisons to the cost of gas in Europe. This is apples to oranges. First, they have a much better mass transit system. You can go from country to country via rail. You can travel by subway or bus or trolley in almost every city or to every city. Therefore, the individual consumer can choose to not drive much more easily than here. Second, they tax in Europe much higher than we do here.
I heard Europeans are having a fuel "strike". We should be doing the same here! Why is there no outcry against our congress not passing legislature that allows drilling for more oil domestically??
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