We kicked this week off with a more positive sentiment than most of the recent weeks that we have experienced.  As a result of Monday's market action, the broad domestic equity benchmarkets such as the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 were up in the 3% neighborhood.  While the equities markets have certainly gone wild this past couple months, the commodity markets have had their own ups and downs as well.  However that is not to say that there is no opportunities to be had in these markets although the opportunities may get narrower than they used to be.  One area we want to specifically discuss about today is Crude Oil.  Although Crude Oil has its own story to be told since the beginning of this past summer, that story could possibly change its direction soon as we've seen oil futures end up closing higher each day for four consecutive days.  At the time of this writing, Crude Oil is trading at $85.82/contract, resulting in an increase of 13.4% as a result of these last four trading days.

If we want to have exposure to Crude Oil but don't want to be involved with the futures market, the exchange-traded product market is certainly one place to turn to.  There are currently multiple ETFs/ETNs that track various commodities including Crude Oil.  As shown below, these are some ETFs that provide exposure to Oil although they have different techniques of tracking the index as they all don't produce identical results.  Notice that the UCO that is bolded in the table below is a leveraged fund where it doubles the return of the index that it tracks.  To get more ideas in the Energy sector, simply visit the ETF Xray page to do the search.