While it has been a bull market for stocks, it has bearish for energy stocks such as BP (NYSE: BP), Chevron (NYSE: CVX), ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM), and many others.

The main exchange traded fund for oil, United States Oil (NYSE: USO), is down more than 50 percent for the last six months of market action (chart below).

But that could all be wrong according to an article in Nature magazine by Mason Inman.  In his piece in Nature magazine, “”Natural Gas: the Fracking Fallacy,” Mason contends that the oil and natural industry, and thus the investment community, is misreading the data.  Rather than wide spread formations of oil and natural gas throughout the United States, there are only a few isolated “sweet spots.”  The bounty of these few pockets is leading to tremendous miscalculations.

If that is true, the market will become much more bullish for Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, United States Oil, and many, many other energy securities that have been beaten down over the last six months of trading.

The chart below for United States Oil clearly shows that the market does not agree with Mason Inman and those he interviewed in his article.  Rather than a shortage, there is a glut. That is why the prices have plunged for so many energy securities.

This is what supply and demand is all about in the pricing of goods and services in a free market.

Inman could be right.  That would mean that the market is wrong.  But looking at the collapse in oil and natural gas prices, the market was certainly not properly aligned before as no commodity as widely used as oil should fall by 50 percent in such a short period of time.  What Inman’s article does prove, no matter what the end result in oil and natural gas, is that investing for the long term is always the best strategy.