A recent study showed that home sales fell in 41 different states during the April to June period. According to the National Association of Realtors, one-third of the metropolitan areas that the group follows saw lower home prices as well during the quarter.

This really should not be too surprising to our readers. Not only have we covered the weak real estate market pretty extensively, every news media out there has been pushing the news in front of its readers over the past several months. Yes, last year there was still some debate as to whether or not a housing crunch was coming, but even the die hards who said the housing bubble would never burst have been forced to admit the troubles the sector has been seeing lately.

But even myself, someone who has been bearish on housing for the past couple years, is seeing some signs that we may be about to see things turn around. Don't get me wrong, I still see some more downside lasting through the end of this year, but I think things are, at least minimally, starting to balance out.

It is like everything else in the world (except maybe Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) which seems to defy gravity), what goes up must come down, and housing was no different. Low interest rates fueled one heck of a housing boom, so strong of a boom, that a burst was, in my mind, inevitable. And that is exactly what was happened. But is this really a bad thing?

It was a tough day across the board for oil stocks. Falling oil prices and several industry downgrades pushed stocks down hard in today's trading session.

Oil has been falling sharply over the last month since briefly passing over the $80 barrier during the Lebanese / Hezbollah conflict back in July. Today oil continued its downward spiral and currently the precious crude is trading at $67.50 a barrel. There are a lot of reasons why oil has been on the slide lately, but mainly it comes down to supply and demand. Well lately we have seen that the supply / demand picture is not quite as fragile as analyst's had been thinking. Inventories have actually been on the rise lately but I doubt anyone has been expecting to see crude oil sliding down towards the mid $60's so quickly.

Another key reason as to why oil has been falling has been the lack of any major hurricanes this season. Around the middle of the summer all we were hearing about was how this hurricane season was going to be a tough one, and possibly even worse than what we experienced last summer, and that just hasn't turned out to be the case. Not only have we yet to experience any major storms, weather experts have now reversed their opinions and are calling for a very weak season ahead of us. While that is encouraging news for the country, it has hit oil stocks pretty hard. It wasn't too long ago that most stocks were approaching or setting new highs, and now it feels like the rug has been pulled out from under us.