There is an exciting opportunity in commodities right now, and there is one place you absolutely must look into… India. While we don’t have the perfect penny stock play on this one just yet, you still have to check out what Chris Mayer has to say…

It’s a Small World After All

“The world's favorite season is the spring. All things seem possible in May,” said Edwin Way Teal. And so it seemed during the past week as we witnessed a further improvement in investor sentiment and risk appetite, supported by the viewpoint that the worst of the credit crisis might be behind us.

The last week was characterized by investors increasingly taking the view that the worst of the credit crisis was over. They seemed to be shrugging off further substantiation of the dreadful state of the US housing situation, as they digested the latest round of quarterly earnings reports.

It’s Earnings, Stupid! Or so it seemed during the past week as the stock market took its cue from a host of better-than-feared earnings reports, propelling the S&P 500 Index 4.3% higher – a bigger gain than for the entire 2007. And what a swift turnaround it was after the market got “GE’d” and was in sackcloth and ashes by the close of the previous week!

A sense of relative calm descended upon financial markets over the past week. Although fears about the outlook for the US economy persisted, a perception crept into markets that much of the bad news related to the credit crisis was now out in the open, with the result that the equity bulls had reason to feel rather pleased with their performance by the close of the week.

The gold bubble has popped and there goes the weasel. Commodities are done. Time to move into solars.

“This is one ‘mother’ of a market,” 83-year old market veteran Richard Russell aptly described what market participants were again faced with during the past week. Sentiment was fragile as the outlook was still dominated by the familiar cast of deteriorating economic data, housing woes and concerns about the financial sector.

Phew – what a tumultuous week! Once again, the fall-out of the subprime mess had a lot to do with it. For some variety, however, it was not only financials that were in the limelight, but also commodities that corrected sharply.

The biggest commodity collapse in at least five decades may signal Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has revived confidence in U.S. financial firms.

Commodities across the board- hard, soft, and tender- have all been obliterated in just a day and a half as rumors go around that hedge funds who were leveraged up trading commodities have to unwind that leverage, causing a run on commodity profits like a run on Bear Stearns last week. Others are pointing to the strong (i.e.

Can money trees in fact grow to heaven? It was certainly beginning to look that way when considering the frenzied surge of many commodities to new highs week after week. But the past few days have seen commodity prices pulling back from their lofty levels. What should one read in this?

Follow the link to a short article on the outlook for commodities.

The stock market investing environment is certainly scary to a lot of investors in the short term. With fears of a recession on the horizon, along with problems like the falling value of the U.S. dollar, rising commodity prices, distressed credit ratings and problems with inflation, the thought of pushing new money into the stock market is definitely not a popular idea.

The irony is that the very people who are benefiting from higher oil prices - government funds in the middle-east - might be investing in oil futures via hedge funds and further contributing to the price hike, which benefits them even more.

Credit and liquidity issues ravaged the financial markets during the past week and resulted in plenty of white knuckles and shaky knees, climaxing on a particularly sour note on Friday with the Bear Stearns bailout.