It’s weird how stock investing twists your thinking around. First off, when I have a down day, I can’t help but stress over it. I read articles, postmortems, commentaries, and I do so over and over and over. I hate down days.

But I’ve also gotten used to a pretty high level of volatility in my portfolio. And that means, when the numbers go up, they really really go up. So $66 seems like a bust. Especially when I feel like I need to recover from last week (net down -$410)

For the most part, the day was pretty quiet, with the exception being SandRidge Energy (SD) delivering more than 5% up. I’ll take it, especially when crude oil closed the futures trading session at $128.85, its first notable pullback in a week.

Oil and oil services companies are currently very strong buy candidates. When you take into account rising international demand and supply that’s just not growing (no to mention the possibility of peak oil), you have the perfect storm to explain why oil and gas is so expensive. Oil exploration and production companies are VERY profitable at $130 oil.

No only that. If for some reason oil prices drop precipitously – for whatever reason – these oil and gas companies will continue to be safe investments. Imagine, if SandRidge Energy is profitable at $80/barrel of oil, you’d have to see a full collapse in oil prices before you have to worry about these companies.