– Foreword – By Porter Stansberry Founder, Stansberry Research
I was invited to speak in 2012 at a seminar for big-shot commodities investors. There was probably a couple hundred people in the room who were all writing big checks for oil and gas exploration at the time. I asked the audience facetiously at the start of our presentation: “How many people here are long oil with their portfolio?” Of course, everybody in the room raised their hand. I said, “OK, but how many people here are really long oil? How many people here are investing more than a couple million dollars in oil and gas?”
Pretty much everybody in the room raised their hand. I led off my presentation with an expletive: “You guys are all F’ed.”
I went on to explain why oil was going to crash below $40 a barrel. (This was when it was well over $100.) None of their projects were economic below $50 or $60 a barrel at the time. So of course, they all laughed. They thought I was kidding. The head of the conference even wrote a Forbes article lambasting me for making such an “absurd” prediction.
But it’s interesting how many times these absurd predictions come true. Oil did crash to $40 a barrel.
People thought it was absurd when I debunked the “Peak Oil” story – the idea that oil production was in permanent decline…
In 2010, I was among the first people anywhere to write about the
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