This line (subscription required) from today's Wall Street Journal pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how not useful Wall Street analysts are:

Just a month ago, Goldman's commodity analysts predicted crude oil would average $148 a barrel next year. On Sept. 16, they trimmed that forecast to $123. On Monday, they slashed it to $86 a barrel.

That's right: analysts are being paid millions of dollars and receiving tax deductions on pinstripe suits to raise estimates as prices rise and then slash them when they fall. Such analysis is truly priceless -- almost as valuable as a solar-powered flashlight or a Wiimote-powered Roomba. And keep in mind that Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) is actually probably the best firm on Wall Street.

The point is this: most of the analysts you see on networks like CNBC are just expressing their mood on that particular day.

If you're in it for the long-term, the best thing you can do is nothing -- live within your means, invest regularly, and don't pay too much attention to the news.

One way to go broke is to buy oil when the analysts says it's going to $148 and then sell it after the downgrade.

On a day when we got surprising news about a decline in gasoline and crude oil supplies, you would think that we would get some upside to oil. That was not the case today as news of warm weather outweighs the inventory report pushing crude down as far as $61.84 earlier today. Currently oil is being priced at $62.29 a barrel.

While analysts were expecting this week's inventory report from the Energy Information Administration to show an increase in supplies of around 220,000 barrels we actually got a report of a decline of around 1.1 million barrels in crude inventories. A pretty big difference which would typically have brought out the bulls in strong force to drive prices up. But for now oil just does not want to move too much higher than its recent price range of between roughly $62 and $64 a barrel.

It looked a few days ago that oil was on it's way to bust through support of about $64 (see chart from that day). Had that happened we could have easily been looking at prices headed up to the high 60s, but I think before we see the precious crude make any sort of break out we are going to have to play the wait-and-see game with OPEC and its upcoming December 14th meeting. While we have discussed many times over here that OPEC cut announcements are typically more ceremonial than meaningful, the market still tends to listen, just not always believe. That is where we are right now. No one wants to make too large of a bet one way or the other about what the oil cartel is going to say at their next meeting, and for now I think we can just expect to watch oil bouncing around in the lower $60's.

Current chart of oil: