DeerIslander:

BTW -- Has anyone worked out how these commodity plays will perform if Congress or the CFTC follows through with its threat to ban commodity index speculation? Seems to me it could be a nasty and sudden unwind.

I'm definitely keeping that in mind.  Congress is slowly acting on this, but they're not going to address the swaps till September.  That can potentially be a biggie for the index speculators.  But even before that, they can sizeably up the margin requirements and that can have a big effect on ALL speculators.  So any commodity trading people want to do in the short term should be accompanied by some serious babysitting imo.