Friday afternoons are really getting to be fun

There may well be a correction ahead for commodities, but then again, they may just keep going up. It's been a pretty impressive run since mid-August and, so far in 2007, the model portfolio at Iacono Research, tallied every Friday afternoon at about this time, has almost equaled last year's gain of just over 25 percent (have a look to the left).

The chart for the Guess the Year-end Price of Oil and Gold Contest will be updated again next Friday - in the meantime, here's what the price of oil looks like over the last year. Subscribers were urged to buy an oil ETF in mid-January - not an easy thing to do at the time, but well worth the effort almost one year later.

The gold price too has warmed to the Fed's easy money policy under Ben Bernanke - someone's going to have to come up with a lot of gold to dump into the market in order to keep the price down, particularly as short-term rates head lower in the U.S.

Subscribers were urged to buy gold at below $650 during most of the last year and a half, then again one last time at $657 just two months ago. In mid-August, I wrote:

I've also turned the buy indicator for gold back to green - given what happened last week in financial markets and the pummeling that was taken by mining equities, it's not clear to me that gold will ever reach the $640 mark again, the level that had previously been identified for changing the indicator color.

In retrospect, I should have taken my own advice and bought more myself instead of waiting for the Fed's half point rate cut in September - see Punish the savers.

The months ahead should be fun to watch - next week's update to the oil and gold contest should be interesting too.

To learn more about investing in natural resources using commonly traded ETFs, stocks, and mutual funds, see this description at Iacono Research. Or, sign up for a free trial.