Paging drgood--you were right and Jaloti was wrong

Back here on my loser list I mentioned a buying opportunity in the "canroys"--canadian oil and gas royalty trusts. Drgood commented by asking, essentially, isn't there a lot of downside risk in these since they will probably drop as interest rates rise? I responded by saying I always thought these were correlated more with the price of oil than with interest rates, but maybe I was wrong--I posted the charts and said look at the charts, maybe there is some correlation there, whaddya think?
The other day in the chairman's chat I mentioned I was looking at the correlations between the canroys, interest rates, and oil prices using "math". Let me say officially that I was wrong and Drgood was right. I'll give a few details below, but I looked at one canroy, PGH, and found a strong correlation with the price of treasuries, and in fact a little better correlation with the Nasdaq, for goodness' sake, than with the price of oil.
My method was fairly straightforward--I downloaded historical price data from stockcharts.com for PGH, the CBOT treasuries index, the West Texas Intemediate crude price, and the COMPQ.
I entered the numbers into my trusty Open Office spreadsheet (almost as good as excel, but the price is much better-"free"), and used the "R" correlation function. If you don't know what R is, it is essentially a measure of how 2 variables are correlated. If 2 variables are perfectly correlated, (e.g. one changes in exactly the same direction and ratio as the other), R would equal 1, if there was no correlation (e.g. two sets of random numbers) R would equal 0, and if they were perfectly negatively correlated (e.g. one moves in exactly the opposite direction--like bond prices and interest rates) R would equal -1. (If your smart in math/statistics you'll undoubtedly find flaws in my descriptions--if I am "materially misleading or incorrect" let me know. Aw heck, even if you want to nitpick let me know).
The results surprised me. Over the past 10 months, the correlation between PGH and treasuries was 0.8--that's pretty highly correlated. The correlation between PGH and the COMPQ was 0.66 and between PGH and WTI crude was 0.58. That's right--PGH was a little better correlated with the Nasdaq, than with crude. Over the past month, correlations were lower, but still better with treasuries than oil--PGH and treasuries was 0.57, and PGH and WTI was 0.47.
I intend to play around with these correlations a little more, but I have to say I am surprised, and hopefully I learned something. In the words of Alexander Elder--"I reserve the right to be smarter tomorrow than I am today." Thanks Drgood!