Got the shaft

Just cause you got commodities doesn't mean you've got a goldmine. Those folks blindly chasing the commodity rush need to be wary. (Heard one fundie on CNBC saying he's buying iShares of Canada and Australia, which are basically index plays -- like the SPI -- even though commodities only account for less than a quarter of the whole market; now that is truly a desparate way to chase the bull.)
First of all, the business has to be properly managed. And there can be plenty of mismangement, such as Sons of Gwalia, a former market darling. See: http://www.theage.com.au/news/alan-kohler/why-did-gwalia-fail-ask-the-lalor-brothers/2005/08/19/1124435144575.html?oneclick=true
Second, shares ain't stuff. The old commodity bull, Jim Rogers, makes that point explicitly, at the following blogsite: http://trading-online.blogspot.com/2005/08/update-interview-jim-rogers-co-founder.html
Investment U: Should there be a hard landing in China, do you anticipate a major consolidation in commodities?
Jim Rogers: Yes, I do. Something’s going to cause consolidations in commodities. We always have consolidations in every bull market in history.
Again, I wish I were smart enough to tell you exactly what’s going to cause them, and the timing, but I’m not. It’s pretty obvious to me that if we suddenly see headlines in the Wall Street Journal of some kind of turmoil in China, that commodities would be having a correction, or would go into a correction...
Investment U: Commodities seem so simple on that level - supply and demand... How does investing in commodities compare with stock investing in terms of the average investor?
Jim Rogers: It couldn't get any simpler. And if you start looking into commodities, you'll see that commodities are a lot simpler and easier to analyze than stocks.
For instance, natural gas is pretty dumb stuff. If there's too much gas, it's going to go down. If there's too little, it's going to go up.
Natural gas doesn't know who Alan Greenspan is, or care; it just cares about supply-and-demand. And once you've made that analysis, it's a lot easier to buy and sell natural gas than to start analyzing 300 natural gas companies around the world, where you have to worry about management and balance sheets and stock markets and unions and environmentalists and dozens of other things.
Investment U: And you believe commodities can be less risky than stocks, too?
Jim Rogers: Well, Enron was a natural gas company. Enron went to zero. Natural gas can never go to zero. It can go down, obviously, but it can never go to zero.