Below, I have listed a portfolio of ten stocks that will almost certainly double in three years. If I am wrong, it will gain 100% in only two years.

But there is a catch. This basket of stocks may have to drop 20%-30% first. It is a cardinal rule of investment that if you want to earn higher returns, you must accept higher volatility as well.

It doesn’t require a rocket scientist to figure out that this is an energy-based portfolio.

Crude almost certainly hit its trough in the current quarter at $26 a barrel. But this python has a couple of pigs that it has to digest first.

As an old oilman, I can tell you that the oil majors have never been able to forecast the price of oil, and that is with all the resources in the world to accomplish this. This is why they hedge out all their production in the futures market, or with long-term contracts with customers. The oil companies that thought they could predict the price of oil all went out of business a long time ago.

And as a mathematician, I can also tell you that this is an impossible task. There are just too many variables involved. So, don’t even try.

The bottom line is that absolutely no one can pinpoint when and where oil will hit bottom.

Let’s start with the supply side. Thanks to the avalanche of cash that poured into fracking plays at the top of the market last year, US oil production peaked at 9.6 million barrels a day in the spring of last year. It has since fallen to 9 million barrels a day.

This is occurring because once money enters the production pipeline, it stays there forever. Drillers would rather complete a half finished well and sell its output at a loss for a couple of years, rather than shut down construction and lose everything.

However, new projects have fallen precipitously. You see this in the collapse of the number of drilling rigs in use, from a peak of 2,000 five years ago to only 352 last week, according to the Baker-Hughes reports.

Then there is the storage issue. Much of this new oil is going straight into storage. As a result, the facilities at Cushing, Oklahoma, are full. Virtually every tanker in the world has already been chartered and is also loaded to the gunnels with Texas tea.