Is there a way to buy raw oil today and sell it in 1 year time?
There are many ways of investing either directly or indirectly in oil: all of these options are ways to invest in an expected change in the price of oil at various degrees of directness and risk profiles. Investing in derivative or derivative-like products such as futures and CFDs is very risky and requires a good degree of sophisticated knowledge to manage. Unless you have the storage and transportation facilities for it, or can come up with the money needed to rent or build those, no -- or not in any significant quantity.  Buying oil futures is essentially an on-paper version of the same bet. Futures prices are already taking into account both expectations about price changes and the fact that there's cash tied up until they come due, but storage costs also adjust to follow those expectations. You can buy the exchange traded fund ETFS WTI Crude Oil (CRUD), amongst other ETFS products. http://funds.ft.com/uk/Tearsheet/Summary?s=CRUD:LSE:USD Note these funds do not 'jump' when the crude oil futures contracts are in contango (e.g. June contract is priced higher than May) and the futures roll-over, as they do monthly.  When this happens the EFTS continues with no movement.  Currently May is $52.85 and June is $54.15 (so in contango).  LSE:CRUD is $13.40 and if the crude oil futures rolled-over it would carry straight on at that value.  For this reason one should be cautious buying and holding LSE:CRUD longterm.
As mentioned, the main advantage of a 15-year loan compared to a 30-year loan is that the 15-year loan should come at a discounted rate.  All things equal, the main advantage of the 30-year loan is that the payment is lower. A completely different argument from what you are hearing is that if you can get a low interest rate, you should get the longest loan possible.  It seem unlikely that interest rates are going to get much lower than they are and it's far more likely that they will get higher.  In 15 years, if interest rates are back up around 6% or more (where they were when I bought my first home) and you are 15 years into a 30 year mortgage, you'll being enjoying an interest rate that no one can get. You need to keep in mind that as the loan is paid off, you will earn exactly 0% on the principal you've paid.  If for some reason the value of the home drops, you lose that portion of the principal.  The only way you can get access to that capital is to sell the house.  You (generally) can't sell part of the house to send a kid to college.  You can take out another mortgage but it is going to be at the current going rate which is likely higher than current rates. Another thing to consider that over the course of 30 years, inflation is going to make a fixed payment cheaper over time.  Let's say you make $60K and you have a monthly payment of $1000 or 20% of your annual income.  In 15 years at a 1% annualized wage growth rate, it will be 17% of your income.  If you get a few raises or inflation jumps up, it will be a lot more than that.  For example, at a 2% annualized growth rate, it's only 15% of your income after 15 years. In places where long-term fixed rates are not available, shorter mortgages are common because of the risk of higher rates later.  It's also more common to pay them off early for the same reason.   Taking on a higher payment to pay off the loan early only really only helps you if you can get through the entire payment and 15 years is still a long way off.  Then if you lose your job then, you only have to worry about taxes and upkeep but that means you can still lose the home.  If you instead take the extra money and keep a rainy day fund, you'll have access to that money if you hit a rough patch.  If you put all of your extra cash in the house, you'll be forced to sell if you need that capital and it may not be at the best time.  You might not even be able to pay off the loan at the current market value. My father took out a 30 year loan and followed the advice of an older coworker to 'buy as much house as possible because inflation will pay for it'.  By the end of the loan, he was paying something like $250 a month and the house was worth upwards of $200K.  That is, his mortgage payment was less than the payment on a cheap car.  It was an insignificant cost compared to his income and he had been able to invest enough to retire in comfort.  Of course when he bought it, inflation was above 10% so it's bit different today but the same concepts still apply, just different numbers.  I personally would not take anything less than a 30 year loan at current rates unless I planned to retire in 15 years. "Uh, you want to lease a car through a dealer? That is the worst possible way to obtain a car. Dealers love leases because it allows them to sell a car for an unnegotiated price and to hide additional fees. It's the most profitable kind of sale for them. The best option would be to buy a used car off of Craigslist or eBay, then sell it again the same way when you leave. If you sell the car for what you paid, then you get the car for a year for free. If you are determined to go through with the expensive, risky and annoying plan of leasing a car, then you should use a leasing agent. I recommend reading some car buying guides before going out into the wilderness with the tigers and bears. Comment on Leasing Tricks Don't get tricked by the ""interest rate"" game. The whole interest thing is just a distraction to trick you into think you are getting some kind of reasonable deal. The leasing company makes most of their money from fees. For example, if you get into an accident it is a big payday for them. The average person thinks they will never get into an accident, but the reality is that most people get into an accident sooner or later. They also collect big penalties for ""maintenance failures"". Forget to change the oil? BOOM! money. Forget to comply with manufacture recall? BOOM! more money. Forget to do the annual service? BOOM! more money. Scratch the car? BOOM! more money. The original car mats are missing? BOOM! you just paid $400 for a set of mats that cost the leasing company $25 bucks. The leasing company is counting on the fact that 99% of people will not maintain the car correctly or will damage it in some way. They also usually have all kinds of other bogus fees, so-called ""walk-away fees"", ""disposition fees"", ""initiation fees"". Whatever they think they can get away with. The whole system is calculated to screw you." "Your return from a bond fund corresponds to the return on the underlying bonds (minus fees) during your holding period. So you can buy AND sell at any time. Some funds charge a penalty of 2% or whatever if you sell your fund shares within 30 or 60 days of buying it. There are two basic ways to profit from a bond fund. 1) you get dividends from the interest paid on the bonds. 2) you have a capital gain (or loss) on the bonds themselves. 1) is likely to happen. MOST (not all) bonds pay interest on time, and on a regular basis. This component of returns is ALMOST guaranteed. 2) There are no guarantees on what the ""market"" will pay for bonds at any given time, so this component of bonds is NOT AT ALL guaranteed. Your ""total return is the sum of 1) and 2) (minus fees). Since 2) is uncertain, your ""total return"" is uncertain." "A few years back me and a couple of friends made about 100 of these on his 30 watt laser cutter. At the time I was using them for ring boxes, because I make spoon rings and wanted something to give to people for the nicer sterling rings. If I remember correctly we used high ply baltic birch plywood at 1/8"" thickness. The grade we were buying ran us about $30 for a 5'x5' sheet. We cut them into 11x16 sheets, because that's the max size for his laser, and cut roughly 5 out of each sheet. The ones we were making were of course much smaller than what you are looking at though. Materials alone ended up running about $.50 a piece, we were coating with one layer of teak oil. It was roughly ten minutes to cut out 5 boxes, then another ten minutes to pop them out of the plywood and assemble each one. Despite what has been stated, with tweaking, friction fit held up completely fine, we didn't use glue on a single one and I still have a few laying around that are holding up fine also. Anyway, say you are paying yourself roughly $20 an hour, and you can speed it up from what we did and make 20 in an hour, now you have $1 a piece in labor. Keep in mind if you go to a place to have these made, from my experience, most places will charge you roughly $1 a minute for laser time. Add engraving time if you want a logo or something on them, probably another minute per box, all in all in the end these are going to end up costing you $2.50-$3 a box if you have free access to a laser. I would imagine anyone making them for you would probably charge double that.   In the end after the first batch of both these boxes, some slightly different, and some jewelry trees, we found out that it's hard to sell these items for an affordable price and still make it worth your while. If I remember correctly we ended up selling most of the remaining boxes for about $4 a piece just to break even and cover all of our expenses. Of course, this is just my experience, if someone has a way to do this more efficiently and for a profit, I would be interested to hear it, because we still have the laser and probably 100 sheets of plywood left =D" Yes you can do that and it it wise to do so. However, you should make sure that the general trend of the stock is upwards and you buy during a trought in the uptrend. So basically if the stock is making higher highs and higher lows on the daily or weekly charts, then you would want to buy around one of the higher lows before the ex-dividend date. If the stock is making lower lows and lower highs, then it is in a downtrend, so never buy in this instance. It is better to miss out on a dividend of $1 rather than to buy just for this $1 dividend and lose $5 or more when the price continues to drop further. "In general there are two types of futures contract, a put and call.  Both contract types have both common sides of a transaction, a buyer and a seller.  You can sell a put contract, or sell a call contract also; you're just taking the other side of the agreement.  If you're selling it would commonly be called a ""sell to open"" meaning you're opening your position by selling a contract which is different from simply selling an option that you currently own to close your position. A put contract gives the buyer the right to sell shares (or some asset/commodity) for a specified price on a specified date; the buyer of the contract gets to put the shares on someone else.   A call contract gives the buyer the right to buy shares (or some asset/commodity) for a specified price on a specified date; the buyer of the contract gets to call on someone for shares. ""American"" options contracts allow the buyer can exercise their rights under the contract on or before the expiration date; while ""European"" type contracts can only be exercised on the expiration date. To address your example.  Typically for stock an option contract involves 100 shares of a stock.  The value of these contracts fluctuates the same way other assets do.  Typically retail investors don't actually exercise their contracts, they just close a profitable position before the exercise deadline, and let unprofitable positions expire worthless.  If you were to buy a single call contract with an exercise price of $100 with a maturity date of August 1 for $1 per share, the contract will have cost you $100.  Let's say on August 1 the underlying shares are now available for $110 per share.  You have two options: Option 1: On August 1, you can exercise your contract to buy 100 shares for $100 per share.  You would exercise for $10,000 ($100 times 100 shares), then sell the shares for $10 profit per share; less the cost of the contract and transaction costs. Option 2: Your contract is now worth something closer to $10 per share, up from $1 per share when you bought it.  You can just sell your contract without ever exercising it to someone with an account large enough to exercise and/or an actual desire to receive the asset or commodity." "There are a few people that do this for a living. They are called ""market makers"" or ""specialists"" in a particular stock. First of all, this requires a lot of capital. You can get burned on a few trades, a process known as ""gambler's ruin,"" but if you have enough capital to weather the storm, you can make money. Second, you have to be ""licensed"" by the stock market authorities, because you need to have stock market trading experience and other credentials. Third, you are not allowed to buy and sell at will. In order to do your job, you have to ""balance the boat,"" that is buy, when others are selling, and sell, when others are buying, in order to keep the market moving in two directions. It's a tough job that requires a lot of experience, plus a license, but a few people can make a living doing this." Since you seem determined to consider this, I'd like to break down for you why I believe it is an incredibly risky proposition: 1) In general, picking individual stocks is risky. Individual stocks are by their nature not diversified assets, and a single company-wide calamity (a la Volkswagen emissions, etc.) can create huge distress to your investments. The way to mitigate this risk is of course to diversify (invest in other types of assets, such as other stocks, index funds, bonds, etc.). However, you must accept that this first step does have risks.  2) Picking stocks on the basis of financial information (called 'fundamental analysis') requires a very large amount of research and time dedication. It is one of the two main schools of thought in equity investing (as opposed to 'technical analysis', which pulls information directly from stock markets, such as price volatility). This is something that professional investors do for a living - and that means that they have an edge you do not have, unless you dedicate similar resources to this task. That information imbalance between you and professional traders creates additional risk where you make determinations 'against the grain'.  3) Any specific piece of public information (and this is public information, regardless of how esoteric it is) may be considered to be already 'factored into' public stock prices. I am a believer in market efficiency first and foremost. That means I believe that anything publically known related to a corporation ['OPEC just lowered their oil production! Exxon will be able to increase their prices!'] has already been considered by the professional traders currently buying and selling in the market. For your 'new' information to be valuable, it would need to have the ability to forecast earnings in a way not already considered by others. 4) I doubt you will be able to find the true nature of the commercial impact of a particular event, simply by knowing ship locations. So what if you know Alcoa is shipping Aluminium to Cuba - is this one of 5 shipments already known to the public? Is this replacement supplies that are covering a loss due to damaged goods previously sent? Is the boat only 1/3 full? Where this information gets valuable, is when it gets to the level of corporate espionage. Yes, if you had ship manifests showing tons of aluminum being sold, and if this was a massive 'secret' shipment about to be announced at the next shareholders' meeting, you could (illegally) profit from that information. 5) The more massive the company, the less important any single transaction is. That means the super freighters you may see transporting raw commodities could have dozens of such ships out at any given time, not to mention news of new mine openings and closures, price changes, volume reports, etc. etc. So the most valuable information would be smaller companies, where a single shipment might cover a month of revenue - but such a small company is (a) less likely to be public [meaning you couldn't buy shares in the company and profit off of the information]; and (b) less likely to be found by you in the giant sea of ship information. In summary, while you may have found some information that provides insight into a company's operations, you have not shown that this information is significant and also unknown to the market. Not to mention the risks associated with picking individual stocks in the first place. In this case, it is my opinion that you are taking on additional risk not adequately compensated by additional reward.