, Columnist
Best Debt Bet You Can't Make
Energy might be a winner. Too bad it could crush you.
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Kyle Bass thinks it’s a wonderful time to invest in energy companies. He made half a billion dollars betting against subprime-mortgage securities in 2007, so it’s worth listening to his ideas.
His latest one is that the beaten-down energy sector is primed for a rebound. There’s only one catch: It’s incredibly difficult for nonenergy specialists to make this trade. Even Bass himself acknowledges that there just aren’t enough financial instruments available to target the most promising companies easily and quickly, a point he made in a recent “Wall Street Week” interview. The best the average investor can do, Bass said, may be to buy shares of a crude oil exchange-traded fund and hang onto it for about two years.