Utilities are, by design, a bit of a snooze. We feel no excitement at the miracle of instantaneous light, television and coffee grinding, expecting these things simply to happen when we want them to – which, virtually all the time, they do. Similarly, investors own utilities for their steady dividends funded by all of us unthinking bill-payers. This mundane arrangement has fed widows and orphans for decades.
Oil, on the other hand, is wild; a never-ending dance of discoveries, disappointments, Viennese jamborees, wars, trade, presidential tweets and palace intrigues. At times, we really have worried about the pumps running dry. Fortunes and whole economies are lost when prices crash, but the allure of the next killing has been impossible for more adventurous investors to resist.
