So when I say that you should make a list of stocks to buy, I’m not saying you should jump into the market and buy them just because they’re down a few points. I’m saying you should name your price, have the capital ready, and jump on the opportunity IF it comes.

And if this correction is even half as big as I expect it to be, just about every boat will get sunk as the tide recedes.

Even big, blue chip stocks that every investor should own will get hammered.

Last year, Exxon-Mobil (NYSE: XOM) shares sold for less than $60 – even cheaper than they were during the depths of the 2008-2009 bear market – briefly selling for less than 10 times earnings.

That’s the kind of company that should be on your shopping list at that kind of price.

If the oil market was a scientific experiment, then it just found a catalyst.

Regardless of the cause of strife in Egypt - whether it’s higher food prices, or perceived government corruption, ticked off Egyptians or just boredom, we know from past results that trouble in the Middle East tends to boost oil prices.

On the other hand we have a variety of factors that just scream for higher prices. Some folks blame greedy speculators for higher commodity prices, oil especially.

Speculators play a valuable role in any marketplace, and while we all might shake our fists at the greedy speculators who allegedly drove oil prices to $147 a barrel back in 2008, I don’t remember anyone sending out thank you notes and fruit baskets to those same speculators when prices snapped back to $35 a barrel.

And since we’re on the eve of that precipice, with oil tug-of-warring with $90 a barrel, I think it’s important to look at this bold and somewhat confusing notion that spikes in the price of oil are so disruptive and destructive to the marketplace as to actually be one of the sole causes of recessions in the past 40 years.

It’s quite likely that he discovered this notion from someone else, and that even more people have found it by themselves.

Because it really doesn’t take too much digging in to the brief history of oil prices to have the obvious stare you in the face.

Take a look at the chart below which shows oil prices over the past 40 years:

Over the long term it doesn’t matter. The dollar can rise, fall, go to zero - or a billion. It won’t matter. Because the dollar index is really just a mirror, reflecting the dollar’s different exchange rates of a basket of other paper currencies: the Euro, the Japanese Yen, the British Pound, the Canadian Dollar, the Swiss Franc, and the Swedish Krona.

So, it’s entirely possible for all of these currencies to fall in tandem over a long period of time, and although the dollar index would remain flat, the price of gold would rise.

All of these currencies are backed by nothing more than their promises to pay back sovereign debt slower than the rate of inflation.

Europe is already having trouble with this promise, which is why Greece bond rates skyrocketed earlier this year, and it’s why Ireland’s bond rates are soaring today. It’s why Portugal recently threatened to abandon the Euro.

Buying shares of BP wasn’t the popular trade. It was the opposite of the comfortable move to make at the time. I know I felt icky and weird even talking about it. I was one of very few prognosticators making the same recommendation.

And right now, I wouldn’t call BP a buy.

In fact, I wouldn’t recommend buying shares of any of the “blue-chip” oil companies right now. Even though some of them are trading at relatively cheap valuations, they’ve all had an amazing run over the past four to six months.

Today, oil is selling at its 52 week highs.

But one of my favorite ways to invest in rising oil prices is still only slightly more expensive than it was four months ago.

I won’t make the foolish mistake of pushing my personal political views into this letter. My wife calls my ideas crazy, if not offensive and downright unrealistic.

So if my politics elicit disgust and confusion with my own wife, I doubt I’ll have much luck parading them in the pages of the Resource Prospector.

Who you vote for is your business.

But when it comes down to what you should vote for, I have a few things to say on the subject.

I’m talking about the way that we all conduct our personal investment portfolios, as well as the goods and services we buy.

I’ve long believed that these everyday activities are a much more important ongoing vote than any one you cast into a ballot box.

It's tempting to look at the price of a barrel of oil, or the price of a gallon of gasoline as a way to evaluate when oil companies are cheap.

But there's little correlation between oil price and profitability, value or future share price for most of the companies in the oil sector. There are a few exceptions that I'll talk about in a minute...

Not to go into too much detail, but most oil companies, large and small, hedge their production in the futures markets. When you hedge your production, it has the effect of evening out the highs and lows in the market.

You can easily see the effect of hedging by looking at two charts stacked on top of each other: the percentage performance of a price of a barrel of oil plotted with the percentage performance of the AMEX oil index (AMEX: ^XOI).

The AMEX oil index compiles the price movement of the 13 largest publicly traded oil companies. And no, you can't buy it - unfortunately it's not a traded index.

There's a lot of buzz in the oil markets these days, and while we've been kind of lulled into complacency with oil in the $75-$80/barrel range, this situation won't last forever.

It might not even last for long, and right now there's a unique opportunity to buy a highly specialized mid-cap oil company. I'll get to this company in a bit...

In the meantime, the United States currently has one of the largest stockpiles of oil it's ever had, with over 1.13 billion barrels of petroleum inventory - or about 60 days worth of supply at current rates of consumption.

The news immediately caused oil futures to dip - briefly below $75 a barrel.

That'sabout the average price for 2010, year to date:

Today I want to talk about why I think the next couple weeks will be your last opportunity to buy inexpensive oil stocks this summer, and possibly all year.

The reason? Seasonality. Oil prices tend to hit their yearly highs in the third quarter. That's largely due to increased demand from millions of Americans and Europeans driving more for their summer vacations.

This tendency seems to fly in the face of one of those investor "rules" we've all heard a million times before: past performance does not guarantee future results.

It's a mantra for mutual fund managers, financial advisers and newsletter editors. It has an almost Shakespearean meter to it, and if you say it enough you become numb to opportunities on the basis that all of the information you have is from the past - and therefore, unhelpful when it comes to making decisions about the future.

Trading at just over $90 per barrel, the price of crude oil has skyrocketed more than 60% over the course of the past year and benefited major oil drillers such as Transocean Inc. (NYSE: RIG), Diamond Offshore Drilling, Inc. (NYSE: DO) and Noble Corporation (NYSE: NE), which have all seen stock prices rise along with the trend.

Investing in these oil exploration companies is not the only way an investor can play this boom, though. Graham Corporation (AMEX: GHM), based in Batavia, N.Y., is one of many companies that have been cashing in on the strength of the energy sector. Fresh off of 2007 where the company saw its stock price surge an astonishing 297%, Graham now wields a market cap of $169 million.

The company, founded in 1941 in upstate New York, started out with its production efforts focused primarily on producing surface condensers and heat exchangers for the U.S. Navy in World War II. It was after the war that the company made its push into the commercial market.

Today the company designs and builds vacuum and heat transfer equipment that is utilized in a wide array of industries. The key industries that the company serves include the chemical, petroleum refining and electric power generating industries. Graham’s products are used to produce everything from gasoline and electrical power to fertilizers and processed foods.

Graham has come a long way since 1941 and its transition into the commercial market has been a notable success. In 2008, the company is looking to continue where it left off in 2007. It has already rang in the new year with a $3.7 million oil refinery order that was locked up at the beginning of January. The company will be installing an injector system for a refinery that is being reconfigured to process synthetic crude oil.