Scott, very informative article.

It shows the difficulty in futures trading.  You need to get both the direction and the timing correct.  It looks to me that if the price is currently being driven by the futures market as you indicate, than this means that we should eventually see the price of oil increase to reflect supply/demand balance.  The investment in production has been much lower the past 2 years as the price of oil has been declining.  Eventually this will have a large impact on world production and with demand on a steady but slow upward climb, inventories will drop.  I see US shale being able to fill some of this void with fairly quick turnaround, but it won't be able to make up all production that is being lost, especially in those long time frame and expensive deep water wells.

This seems to me like a good opportunity to pick up some solid low cost, well financed producers that have seen stock prices driven down due to concern about the recent drop in oil prices.