What on Earth happened to oil prices?!? Over Thursday and Friday of last week we witnessed crude oil prices jump over 13%. Prices were up over 8% on Friday alone, making that day one of the largest one day gains in the history of crude oil futures. I don’t know about you, but this is really starting to feel like a bubble that’s about to burst to me.

I am going to have to go ahead and disagree with my good friend Venture Opportunist, I do not believe that the food crisis is rubbish, I believe it is real and something that we have to address at a global level. The increase in the current food prices is not based entirely on speculation, speculation may bring the price above where it should be, but there IS a very real shortage of food. If you don't believe this, then go ask the farmers in Thailand that have to guard their crops with loaded shotguns at night. We can see several well-established trends that are working together to bring us to the current food situation. I believe TreeHugger.com says it best in their article Food Shortages Drive Global Prices to Record Highs

Allow me to echo my friend's sentiments: this commodity boom strikes me as strange. While yes, India, Brazil, and of course, China, all keep increasing their demand for energy, and so be it, those changes in the demand dynamic versus a “constant” supply, just can't yield the prices in the futures we see.

It’s no mystery that commodity prices have ballooned to levels that we’ve either never seen before, or at the very least haven’t seen in decades. The real mystery is whether we’re in the midst of a commodity bubble driven by speculation, or if the rising prices are simply the result of scarce supply and exploding demand from emerging markets. This mystery has fueled heated debates between commodity producers and investors and now that the US Government along with Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have become involved, things could get interesting.

Fundamental analysis is a VERY broad topic. At its core, fundamental analysis is essentially a philosophy, or approach to investing that is principally concerned with determining the true value of a company, and by extension, its stock price. In this article, I am going to give a brief lay of the land to help those who are new to investing understand what we mean when we talk about “fundamental analysis”. Again, like most “introduction” articles, this article will be pretty high level… it’s the sub-topics of fundamental analysis, which I will cover in future articles that will most likely be more interesting/applicable.