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Last week, oil prices hit a three-month low, but Jonathan Waghorn and Mark Lacey, managers of the £263m Investec Global Energy fund, said the market was seeing a justified and perfectly rational price correction.

Mr Waghorn said speculation in the market had added to volatility, but he remained upbeat about the sector.

“Speculation is a factor. We focus very much on the fundamentals, and through them we can explain the long term.”

The managers said corrections like these were an inevitable part of the longer-term up cycle in energy commodity prices and pointed out that the crude price has corrected by 20 per cent on 12 occasions since 1999.

They said the energy sector still offered very attractive opportunities compared with the rest of the equity market and that the crude price could test levels closer to $110 or below in the near term.

Mr Waghorn and Mr Lacey said they saw significant upside to the asset-based valuations of stocks such as BP, where p/e ratios were trading at significant discounts to their long-run averages.

Ian Henderson, manager of the £1.8bn JPMorgan Natural Resources fund, is also positive on the attraction of the natural resources sector over the long-term.

Henderson said: “Oil may have dipped recently, but not a week passes without intense oil price conjecture and resulting ‘end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it’ dysphoria. But its price is not so much governed by mere speculation.”

Investors should not be concerned valuations are stretched, he added, as many commodity prices are up strongly, leading to upward earnings revisions.

“Commodity markets have and probably always will be volatile over the short term, but I can see no reason why growth over the next 10 years or more should not mirror that of the previous 10 years.”