Beginner wants to trade oil

I have been an investor in the stock market for a long time now. I have never traded stocks or really tried to learn how to. I am trying to more specifically learn how to trade oil. I am wondering how should I start learning how to start oil trading? Should I do physical oil trading? Do you guys have books, research papers, youtube videos, or traders I should learn from? Thank you. 

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There are a group of styles involved.  You can go long or short outrights (just take a directional view on price), make a call on the spread between time periods, or make a call on the spread between locations.  

There are fundamental drivers behind each of those methods, but unless you really do this full time and have considerable experience at it, it’s going to be hard to compete.  As many descriptions of market developments in the popular financial press are imprecise or inaccurate.  

You can also go the technicals route (this is something I have not ever done personally, but there are people who make money doing it) like you can with any other financial instrument.

I will warn you that commodities are not like stocks.  They, especially recently, have been much more volatile than equities (imagine 5 or 10% flat price swings on unpredictable news) every week.  And are cyclical, not structural.  You can buy and hold most stocks and expect to make money over a long enough time horizon, but this is not the case with commodities, which go boom and bust rather than follow a general trend up.

 

CTAs usually employ trend following strategies based on technicals, across more than one commodity.  As a result, your exposure is not naturally long, short, or only related to one commodity.

An ETF like US Oil is essentially trying to mimic the exposure one would get to buying or selling the futures contract, so you would be naturally long or short.  

 

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