Buy 'em while they're cold

What do we hate? Commodities. When do we hate them? Now.

A few years ago they were the cat's spats. China would devour materials into its bottomless maw. Grand Master Jim Rogers had his 15 minutes, every day. Stocks, other than mining company or agriculture company stocks, were your ancestors' investment. Minerals, fluids, sprouts: that was your seat in the front cabin to wealth.

In case you haven't noticed, the Wise Elders now give a look like your drain has backed up when you talk about commodities. Gold and silver have fallen back into the earth's gravitational field. Copper,  you might as well use it to make pennies. China? Not the insatiable consumer of raw materials after all. Their brand of crony capitalism for the moment seems to be guaranteeing economic brilliance about as well as ours is.

Europe will collapse into negative space and drag the rest of the world with it. Who's going to be dumpster diving for materials?

This whispers in Ghost Money's ear: Time to buy. Commodities are on sale, sweet sale. Don't wait for the moving lips on CNBC to tell you it's right. By then they'll be talking their book and you'll be bidding it up for them.

Buy the drillers and the miners and the growers. Oh, one other thing: then you wait. Most of us investing fools lack that talent.

I own shares of ExxonMobil. I like a company that laughs at hot and cold markets. They don't care if their stock is down $2 today; they don't care if Rance Seleucid & Co. downgrades them from "weak buy" to "strong hold" next week. They're planning for 20, 30 years from now.

That doesn't mean you don't need to be selective and do your research. I was knocked sideways seeing how cheap Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold was the other day. Copper will be top of the pops again and the old crew will be nicking telephone wires for the black market. Gold? They're singing my song.

I was set to plunge some of my hard-earned specie into Freeport (FCX) but I read up on it. That changed my brain. They have two main reserves: Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Which is to say nationalist politics and corruption are the sphere they move in. They have no choice. Ghost Money isn't casting aspersions on FCX, merely saying that whatever agreements they've signed with those regimes aren't worth the ink they're printed with. 

It doesn't worry me that ExxonMobil is doing an extraction deal with Russia. ExxonMobil is a larger and more powerful country than Russia.

Keywords: [Commodities] [gold] [copper] [ExxonMobil] [Freeport-McMoRan]

Ghost Money's author does not claim to know what he's talking about. He is not an investment advisor. This site is for entertainment, if it can even manage that.