Gary Weiss Quotes

The price of a commodity will never go to zero. When you invest in commodities futures, you're not buying a piece of paper that says you own an intangible piece of company that can go bankrupt.

I caught hold of the great bull market in soybeans in 1977. I had no idea what I was doing, incidentally.

Today, there are also buyers and sellers of all these energy commodities, just like there are buyers and sellers of food commodities and many other commodities.

Let the market, not politicians, determine the flow of rice, oil and other commodities. Lower, more stable prices will ensue.

Predicting oil prices is anyone's guess.

The idea that commodities, as an asset class, is finished is just fundamentally flawed.

In crude oil trading, we have seen a 46 percent increase over 1 year in the margins there.

Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle East, assertive oil producers: it is 1973-74 all over again, and at dictation speed.

When the commodities go up and the cost of transportation is going up, and the value of the dollar is going down, it's all going to translate to an 8 to 10 percent rise in food prices.

Gold and silver are no doubt subject to fluctuations, from the discovery of new and more abundant mines; but such discoveries are rare, and their effects, though powerful, are limited to periods of comparatively short duration.

MF Global used to be known as Man Financial, and it had a reasonably good reputation. It did a humdrum business placing commodities trades for fund managers as well as farmers, grain dealers and others whose livelihoods depend on the vagaries of commodity prices.

Oil futures were originally created to give heating oil dealers, gas retailers, aviation companies and other businesses a method of hedging against adverse price changes. Instead, they've become just another Wall Street plaything.

I've talked about commodity price volatility in the past: go back to the tape... I never said it was about inflation.

You cannot have an asset that goes up in price 1% every month or 1% every six months or every day without people starting to start thinking it'll do the same tomorrow, so that's why these bubbles form.

Speculation in oil stock companies was another great evil ... From the first, oil men had to contend with wild fluctuations in the price of oil. ... Such fluctuations were the natural element of the speculator, and he came early, buying in quantities and holding in storage tanks for higher prices. If enough oil was held, or if the production fell off, up went the price, only to be knocked down by the throwing of great quantities of stocks on the market.

Bubbles have quite a few things in common, but housing bubbles have a spectacular thing in common, and that is every one of them is considered unique and different.

Prices don't merely reflect what people think things ought to cost today; they also reflect what people expect items to cost tomorrow.

When volume drops off, prices settle down. Volume is the force that turns stocks higher.

Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.

If global oil prices or commodity prices are high, then it is bound to create inflation. So, we should not be too worried if the inflation is created by global commodity prices. When they come down, inflation will automatically come down.

You'd rather own gold; never own the miner.

The commodity price easing really does not play too much role in our margins because our basic raw material - steel - is not really a commodities engineering steel.

That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.

If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.

You can no longer buy commodities at Merrill Lynch. My guess is many analysts and even executives are too young to know how profitable a hot commodities market can be. They will soon.