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Can you pass this winter without the heating oil heating your house? Something real hard. We are all used to having a warm house with the heating oil or natural gas during winter. importance of oil and natural gas in our lives cannot be denied. Energy is the most important resource for any economy. Without energy no economy cannot function. Do you remember the summer of 2008 when crude oil prices suddenly jumped to around one fifty dollars per barrel. The prices came down because of the stock market crash. But they will go up again when the global economy recovers from recession and starts growing again. Many investors and especially hedge fund managers made a killing with this sudden upswing in crude oil prices by trading crude oil futures. Trading energy futures like the crude oil, natural gas, gasonline or the heating oil can be highly profitable. Crude oil reserviors are being depleted at a fast pace. There is a peak oil theory that says that oil prices will rise in the coming decades as crude oil prices will get decreased while the demand will skyrocket. As a market timer, you should be able to profit from this trend in the market. You need to learn how to trade these energy futures! Learn Commodity Trading! Turn two hundred dollars into one hundred thousand dollars in just three months with this Penny Stock Picking System.Get these three great Stock Trading Reports written by battle hardened investing professional FREE.

Now let's get down to the brasstacks. NYMEX (New York Mercantile Exchange) is the world's largest physical commodity exchange. You can trade a lot of commodity futures contracts at NYMEX including the crude oil, coal, electricity, heating oil, natural gas and propane futures. There are dozens of futures contracts that you can trade. People only talk of the forex as the golden goose. Futures market can be hude and lucrative. Bruce Kovner, the reclusive billionaire who once was a NYC Taxi Cab driver started with only ,000 borrowed on his credit card in 1977. He traded both futures and forex and eventually ended up making Billion. Richard Dennis started with only 0 and ended up making more than 0 Million trading commodity futures. This is the best time to trade crude oil futures. As the global economy comes out of recession, the prices of crude oil will skyrocket this time to around 0 per barrel. Visitng the NYMEX website can give you a lot of useful information on what type of futures contract get traded on it and what the margin requirements for these contracts. You should take a look at the NYMEX website. Now you can electronically trade these futures contract on the CME Group GLOBEX Platform around the clock from the comfort of your home. Of course before you start trading live, you need to paper trade a lot and develop a feel of the energy market.

For smaller traders, NYMEX also offers e-mini versions of these contracts for oil and natural gas with much lower margin requirements. These e-mini oil and gas futures contracts also get traded on the GLOBEX network of Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).

Oil is the driver of global economy. All our transportation depends on oil. Many industries are beholden to oil products. Imagine plastics! Plastics are a a result of polymerisation of oil molecules. So you can well imagine how important oil is for the global economy. When oil prices rise, they tend to make everything else also rise in prices. A phenomenon that we call inflation. So rising oil prices are not good for an economy and cause inflation. When inflation rises it worries the central banks. So central banks are forced to increase the interest rates in the economy to halt the rise of inflation. This increase in interest rates slows down economic activity as the cost of doing business increases. So you can see how damaging oil price increase can be to the economy. We have talked about the peak oil theory. Most of the oil wells have been in production for many decades. Almost all of them are near their end. No major oil well has been discovered in the past few decades. What this means is that we are entering into a phase of decreasing oil supply. But the demand is on the increase with countries like China and India developing fast. So you can well imagine, what this means! Oil prices skyrocketing!

Now, aprt from crude oil futures, you can trade heating oil futures, natural gas futures and even gasoline futures. However you need to know that the demand for heating oil, natural gas and gasoline is seasonal. What this means is that during winter the demand for heating oil and natural gas increase as we need to keep our houses warm. During summers, we all tend to go for vacations in our cars or on aeroplanes to all the beautiful places we can afford with our families and loved ones. This means that in the summer months, demand for gasoline increases.

Now as a trader, you should expect a lull in oil prices in spring as refineries switch production from heating oil to gasoline. In summers again, refineries switch production. Another weekly cycle that you need o keep in mind while trading energy markets is the American Petroleum Institute (API) and US Energy Information Agency (EIA) release their weekly supply data reports. Many traders trade based on these reports! Energy markets are highly susceptible to breaking news. You need to keep an eye on breaking news especially the one that relates to the Middle East from where most of the oil supplies are based.

So, the possibilities are immense. You can trade many futures contracts. The best are the crude oil futures, the heating oil futures and the gasoline futures. Both crude oil prices and the gasoline prices follow each other. Somthing quite obvious as gasoline is a finished byproduct of crude oil. You can trade both!

Tags: crude oil futures, energy futures, energy futures trading, gasoline futures, heating oil futures, natural gas futures, trading energy futures