Daniel Dicker

Wall Street blew it again. They had this one grand chance in the Facebook IPO to try to restore some of the investor confidence that has been lost in the last four years of bank bailouts and bonuses -- and they blew it.

Wall Street brings many new companies to...

The president's proposals to limit speculation in the oil markets does hint at political rhetoric. There is an instant suspicion, and rightly so, when President Obama unveils measures to attack "high gas prices" and asks for congressional help he knows he's not going to get in an election year.

On Wednesday, natural gas traded at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for less than $2 per million cubic feet. Two dollars. This would be news enough -- the domestic, cleaner, abundant and greener fossil fuel -- sitting at low prices not seen in more than a decade. But it...

Why are crude oil futures traded on the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) $30 cheaper, or almost $1 a gallon less, three years from now?

That just doesn't seem possible -- unless the oil trade is totally overrun with speculators and Fed-inspired, cheap-money risk investors.

On CNBC on Friday, I got into...

President Obama's appearance in Cushing, Oklahoma today is politically tangled, and for good reason: Gas prices are the most potent political weapon in the Republican arsenal right now and the White House seems to know it. The question is whether any positive action will emerge from all this talk and...

Have you had enough of paying $4 a gallon for gas? Do you wonder what you're going to do if gas prices go to $5 a gallon this summer? You're not alone.

Gas prices affect everyone, regardless of race, color or political party, yet Washington is stuck in neutral in...

The jobs report released on Friday was pretty good news for America -- and pretty bad news for the GOP.

As we know, much of the hope of the Republicans for making President Obama a one-term leader has been based around the idea of a continuing crisis economy,...

Here we go again: With gas prices spiking so early in the new year, it's easy to predict that the United States will see $4 gas sometime this summer. I would even put the chances of $5 gasoline at one in three.

And it's not the pure fundamentals that...

So much about the collapse of MF Global, the international commodity firm, has revisited the worst sins of the 2008 financial meltdown. There's been outsized betting with other people's money using Wall Street created derivative instruments. Ongoing investigations now show that leverage in these wagers had even eclipsed the worst...

The weekend saw a near catastrophe similar to the Lehman failure in 2008, although it had nothing to do with Europe and few noticed it. The explosion of MF Global continues to cause ripple effects of the type we've seen before, and not in a good way, three...

The weekend's debt compromise hasn't done a thing to cool my boiling anger.

I'm still steaming mad, because I lost a lot of money last week and so did you, and it was entirely unnecessary. And I have news for you, if you have a retirement account in any of...

I'm sitting on a tarmac in Louisville, Kentucky, waiting for takeoff clearance. A minute or so before the engines go to full throttle and we start picking up speed towards heading skyward, I'm thinking about all the people I'm relying upon to have been responsible in doing their jobs: I'm...

The last two days of the oil trade have proven one thing -- just how ridiculously and financially manipulated the oil price, and the price you and I pay at the gas pump, continue to be.

Yesterday, with absolutely nothing going on from a supply or demand standpoint, with nothing...

Argue all you want about the release of 60 million barrels of crude oil from the International Energy Agency, including 30 million barrels from our own Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but one thing you can't argue is the level of its effectiveness -- it is killing the speculators and...

It's so simple, a child of four could understand -- but too difficult for Wall Street to get: High oil and high gas prices are BAD for consumers and business alike and bad for a struggling recovering economy.

Simple, right? No one needs an economics degree to understand that energy...

Silver and BlackRock's silver ETF, iShares Silver Trust ETF (SLV), have been the target of some wild rumors in the past several months.

The crazy stories have run the gamut around the financial blogosphere. One has JPMorgan (JPM) as a puppet of the Federal Reserve, establishing a huge proprietary short...

This is the silly season, oil's silly season. This is the equivalent of PGA golf in Hawaii at the start of the year, NBA basketball after the playoff teams have locked up their spots -- unimportant games that no one is watching, margins of victory or loss that don't reflect...

If anyone ever needed a proof of the power of speculative bets in commodity markets, the last three days of silver's price action should settle all doubts. Silver's almost $12 dollar drop, a massive 25% correction in less than 72 hours (!) is a direct result of chasing...

Want to see lower prices at the pumps? Obama says there's "no silver bullet," while Boehner considers removing tax subsidies to big oil. Romney and Pawlenty take up the cry of "drill, baby, drill," but even unrestricted access to U.S. reserves would only result...

I've watched and traded the oil markets for 25 years and the recent huge speculative inflows of money driving oil and gas prices higher are reminiscent more of the move I saw in 1991, when we were on the cusp of the first Gulf War with Saddam Hussein. Is this...