I'm addicted to watching the markets. I should finish my MBA and take the CFP test if I like this so much. My job for the group project is to take $1.5 million of our $10 million endowment and invest it in commodities. This led me to do a bunch of reading on commodities and then look up the charts that trend the movement of each individual commodity. Commodities have done pretty well over the past five years and the upswing may be over (recently the index has taken a dive). I wish I knew about this five years ago. Commodities have a very low correlation with the S&P 500 so you would want to buy them for diversification.

I talked to my broker yesterday about buying into more commodities funds. I bought a small amount of a natural resources fund in 2005 and it's been kicking butt since then (energy has done well, but that run seems to be over). He said that people with portfolios of $2 million and up should put a small amount (5 to 10%) in commodities. I said, what about the poor people like me? Why can't I invest in commodities? The answer is that the commodities market has a high volatility, so you want to limit your investments to small amounts of high risk when you don't have much to invest. Nevertheless, I'm tempted to invest more because my 2005 selection has done so well.

This stuff could drive me crazy. I keep trying to time the market on my play portfolio since it doesn't matter if I lose the money.

I like commodities, because I am a realist and I can imagine the actual timber, soybean oil, gold, copper, and so on, as physical objects. But it seems to be very complicated, and I have only grazed the surface of it.