I'll Take My Oil Without the Barrel, Please

I think I've found an answer, but let's look at the alternatives.

• Fair -- Oil stocks: Buying stocks in oil, oil-service or oil-refining companies is the conventional approach, but your oil price bet is only indirect. You're really betting on the quality of the company -- its management, market position, asset and reserve quality, geopolitical risk exposure and regulatory compliance. It's easy, and you might get a nice dividend while you wait, but you're taking on a whole set of additional factors and risks.

• Fair -- Oil stock funds: Stock mutual funds and ETFs that specialize in oil and oil-service indices are less risky than buying individual stocks, but they are another step removed from a pure play, and you may pay 50 to 150 basis points or more (0.50% to 1.50%) in management fees.

• Good -- Oil futures: Oil futures tempted a lot of individual investors -- and institutional ones too -- as prices ran up last summer. But you have to know what you're doing. Sure, you can control a lot for a little. In this case you can own 1,000 barrels, or $52,000 worth of crude, with a $4,000 down payment (the rest is margin). But you must be right, and you must be right by a particular date, or you lose it all. I don't know about you, but it's hard for me to tell when oil will rise; I just know that it will.

Now for my answer -- or answers, actually. Apparently to satisfy the needs of investors like me, some new and more-direct instruments came forward last year to let people buy oil. Well, not oil, really -- just the price of oil: