Dang it! Looks like oil might close above $54 after a couple of weeks of moving towards - breaking briefly - but not closing below $50 a barrel. Of course the big story is going to be ethanol with the President’s State of the Union speech tonight. Will he announce more unfunded programs that further the ethanol bull market? The ethanol concept is very appealing, but some of the facts don’t all come together so nicely. I would love to see us move away from foreign oil and personally I am prepared to pay a higher price on energy to help make that happen. There are some structural problems with ethanol that just make it more of an uphill battle than some supporters are willing to admit.

PS:  Ah ha!  I just heard that the DOE is adding 11 million barrels of oil to the strategic petroleum reserve.  Okay - this makes sense now.  Perhaps this will just be a blip on the price charts in the next several months.