Category Archives: Energy

technical analysis: double bottom

November 13, 2014 By in Casinos, counter-trend movements, earnings conference calls, Energy, Hong Kong, Macau, major changes in market direction, market bottoms, Technical Analysis Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Regular readers will know that I’m not a particular fan of technical analysis, at least as a primary tool in determining the investment attractiveness of the equity market or of individual stocks.  A hundred years ago–maybe even sixty years ago–it was the tool, because there was nothing else.  Before the SEC, company financials were a joke, and they weren’t easily available in a timely manner.  Watching the trading patterns of the “smart money” was arguably the best an average person could do.

Nowadays, the SEC’s Edgar site has all US-traded companies’ filings available for free the instant they’re made.  Most companies also have extensive libraries of their own available on their sites.  Firms now webcast their earnings conference calls for all to hear.  If you don’t feel like listening, transcripts are available for free soon afterward from Seeking Alpha.  

So it isn’t so much that technical analysis is bad per se.  It’s just that like the horse-drawn cart it’s been replaced by fundamental information that’s quantum leaps better.

support/resistance

Still, there are some aspects to technical analysis that I find useful.  One is support/resistance.  This is the idea that price levels where there has been significant past trading volume, preferably over an extended period, will act as floors to support stocks as they fall, as well as ceilings to impede their advance.  Both holding at and breaking through these levels are often significant events.  In particular…

double bottom

When the market has been declining for an extended period of time, or has dropped particularly sharply (the “magic” numbers technicians use are typically losses of 1/3, 1/2 or 2/3 of the prior advance), it often stabilizes for no apparent reason and begins a significant upward bounce (+10%?).

The fact that prices are now going up isn’t enough by itself to establish they have reached an important low.  In almost all cases (March 2009 was, on the surface at least, a significant exception–see below), stocks begin falling again within a few weeks and find themselves approaching the previous low.  If the market touches–or almost touches–the previous low but begins to rebound again (in the US, the market may briefly trade lower than the previous low–we’re daredevils, after all), this is often a strong sign that resistance is forming at the old low.  This revisiting of the low is the necessary second part of the double bottom.

There can be a triple bottom, too.  More often, in my experience, the market begins a new, upward pattern of higher highs and higher lows after the second bottom.

Fundamental conditions must also be in place for this bottoming to happen.  Stocks have to be cheap; investor pessimism must be high; the downtrend must be protracted enough for at least some investors to think that conditions won’t get worse.

In essence, what the double bottom tells us is that intense negative emotion that has been driving prices sharply (often irrationally) lower has begun to play itself out.

current examples

Double bottoms happen with individual stocks and stock groups, too.

Look at the Macau casinos traded in Hong Kong.  Some, like Galaxy Entertainment, have lost half their value over the past ten months.  But the group appears to have bottomed in late September-early October.   The stocks bounced off their lows, returned near them several weeks later and appear since then to have established a new upward pattern.

I haven’t looked carefully at energy stocks–but the oils are a group where I’d be looking for similar behavior.

the March 2009 case

The S&P 500 appeared to me to be bottoming in early 2009.  As is usual during recessions, government programs were being put in place to stop the economic bleeding.  Anticipating this, investors had pretty much stopped selling.  However, in late March investors were horrified to hear that Congress failed to pass the proposed bank bailout bill/  Some (Republican) Representatives were even saying they would prefer a rerun of the Great Depression to a bank bailout.  The S&P fell more than 7% on the news, but recovered all its losses when the bill was passed the following day.  If we erase those two trading days, early 2009 exhibits a “normal” bottoming process.

 

 

offshore contract drillers when the oil price is sinking

November 10, 2014 By in Energy, Industry Analysis, offshore contract drilling Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Last Friday, offshore contract  oil and gas driller Transocean Ltd (RIG) announced that in its September quarter earnings statement it would be taking an impairment charge of close to $2.7 billion, or more than a quarter of the stock’s market capitalization.  The reason:  deterioration of its business prospects caused by the recent sharp decline in the world oil price.

Despite this bad news, the stock closed down less than a percent on the day  …a trading session in which the S&P 500 ended basically unchanged.

Why the muted reaction?

Offshore contract drilling is a very capital-intensive business.  It can easily cost over half a billion dollars to build a state-of-the-art semi-submersible rig.  Contract drillers rent their rigs out under long-term contract to oil exploration and development companies at rates of tens of millions of dollars a year.

In good times, meaning when the oil price is rising,  rental rates go up as well.  Contract drillers tend to sink all their cash flow (often plus all they can borrow) into building new rigs.  This, of course, keeps both financial and operating their leverage high and eventually leads to overcapacity (as is the case in any capital-intensive commodity business).

In bad times, i.e., when the price of oil is falling, demand from the big oil companies wanes and rental rates fall.  Worse than that, customers seek to renegotiate down rental rates for rigs already under contract, or simply announce they don’t need the rigs any more and, contract or no, stop paying and return them.  Ouch!

The key variable in all this is the oil price.  Because of this, the stock market takes the spot price of oil as a leading indicator of the drillers’ future profits and trade on that rather than waiting for reported earnings.  Again, this is common in other commodity-like industries, as well.

The message I take from Friday’s price action is that, for the moment at least, the market expects the oil price to stabilize around current levels. Monday’s earnings announcement and conference call by RIG (I’m writing this on Sunday night) will be a further indicator of whether my view is correct.

oil at $80 a barrel–a Saudi plot?

October 24, 2014 By in Accounting, Capital-intensive firms, capitalizing vs. expensing, cash flow, cash flow/share vs. earnings/share, deferred tax, depreciation, Energy, Industry Analysis, shale oil, Strategy Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I don’t think so  …and if the Saudis are trying to keep oil prices low in order to drive American shale oil out of business, it’s a pretty pathetic one  (Tom Randall of Bloomberg, for example, recently wrote an otherwise excellent article in which he supports the plot view).

Here’s why:

Any oil project starts with geology work to locate prospective acreage for drilling.  The oil firm then purchases mineral rights from the owner of the land where it intends to drill.  Next comes the actual drilling, which can cost $5 million – $10 million a well.  The driller also needs some way of getting output to market, which may entail building a spur to the nearest pipeline, or at least paving the local roads so that trucks he hires can get to the wellsite.

All that outlay comes before the exploration company can collect a penny from the oil or gas that comes to the surface.

In other words, the project costs are significantly front-end loaded.  This is important.  It means the economics of the situation change dramatically according to whether you’ve already made the up-front investment or not.

An example:

I took a quick look at the latest 10-Q for EOG Resources, a shale oil driller.

Over the first six months of the year, EOG took in $6.5 billion from selling oil and gas, and had net income of $1.4 billion.  That’s a net margin of 21.5%.  At first blush, it looks like a 20% drop in prices would put EOG in big trouble.

Look at the cash flow statement, however, and a different picture emerges.  The $1.4 billion in net comes after a provision of $1.9 billion for depreciation of some of those upfront expenses and after another provision of $479 million for deferred (that is, not actually paid yet) income taxes.  So the actual cash that came into EOG’s hands during the period was $3.8 billion.  That’s a margin of 58.4%–meaning that prices could be more than cut in half and EOG would still be getting money by continuing to operate existing wells.

Yes, at $70 a barrel, new shale oil projects are probably not sure-fire winners.  But oil companies will continue to operate oil share wells, even at prices below this in order to recover capital investments they have already made.  The right time for Saudi Arabia to throw a monkey wrench in to the shale oil works would have been three or four years ago, not today.

The wider point:  once a new entrant has made a big capital investment to get into any industry, it’s very hard to get the newcomer out.  Even if incumbents make the new firm’s position untenable, the latter’s goal just shifts away from making money to minimizing its mistake by extracting as much of its capital as it can.  It will be willing to destroy the industry pricing structure if necessary to do so.

 

 

 

why the oil price will continue to be weak

October 22, 2014 By in Energy, Industry Analysis, Mining, oil and natural gas, Recent Market Action, shale oil and gas, Strategy Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

supply and demand

In the short term (read:  for now and for some vague time into the future), demand for oil is pretty constant, no matter what the price (i.e., demand is inelastic).   People need to fuel their cars and heat their homes.  Industry needs to generate electric power and keep factories humming.

The supply of oil is similarly inelastic, for two reasons:

–major oilfields are mammoth, expensive, multi-year capital projects.  Engineers get underground oil flowing toward wells at what they calculate to be the optimal rate to drain the entire deposit.  Changing that rate once the oil is moving can mess things up so that lots of oil gets left behind–meaning having to do expensive and time-consuming extra drilling to recover it.

–a macroeconomic look at OPEC’s oil-producing countries, especially in the Middle East, is a real eye-opener.  These nations typically have large young populations and more or less no economic activity other than oil.  In my cartoon-like view, they have tons of high school graduates entering the workforce each year and nothing to offer them but make-work “jobs” funded by oil money.  Keeping the political status quo ultimately requires that the oil keep flowing.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the budget breakeven oil price for Iran, for instance, is $140 a barrel and Saudi Arabia’s is $93.  (This isn’t an immediate do-or-die thing, though.  Countries can use savings, borrow or sell assets to bridge a budget gap for a while.)

recent history

Over the past decade or more, supply and demand have been close to being in balance, with China’s strong economic growth giving prices an upward bias.

China is now trying to halt the proliferation of low value-added, energy-wasting industry, so this source of extra demand is fading.  More important, the advent of oil extraction from shale in the US has raised world oil supplies by about 6%, or 5 million barrels a day over the past five years.

Given that demand is relatively constant, the only way to get buyers for this extra oil is to cut prices.  This is what’s happening now.

revisiting the 1980s

There’s lots of ugly history of colonial exploitation of Middle Eastern oil producers in the 1970s and before.  Let’s skip over that, in this post at least.

During the 1970s, OPEC pushed the price of a barrel of oil from under $2 to around $25.  By the start of the 1980s, the association was clearly divided in to two camps.  One wanted to maintain the highest possible current price (which had risen to around $35 for the easiest oil to refine).  The other, led by Saudi Arabia, the largest OPEC producer, feared users would find substitutes for oil, diminishing the long-term value of their vast untapped reserves.  It wanted prices at, say, $15 – $20 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia decided to force its will on the other camp by unilaterally raising production to stabilize prices.  However, a long and deep global recession soon began (partly caused by higher oil prices, mostly by the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates sharply to choke off runaway inflation in the US).

Saudi Arabia then reversed course and began to cut production, again to defend its preferred price level.  Other OPEC nations agreed to reduce production as well, but by and large never did.  Prices eventually bottomed at about $8 a barrel.

The point, though, is that the Saudi attempt to act as the “swing” producer by raising and lowering its output in order to stabilize prices, didn’t work out.  All that happened was that Saudis absorbed a huge amount of the pain of the price decline, allowing its OPEC rivals to prosper, in a relative sense at least.

today

I think Saudi Arabia learned from its experience in the early 1980s that unilaterally reducing production doesn’t work.  Besides, unlike in the early 1980s, it needs its current coil income to balance its budget.

Shale oil production will continue to grow, if nothing else simply from projects begun a few years ago.

As a result, I think the oil price will drift lower, either until a healthier world economy increases demand, or until lower prices force high-cost oil producers to shut down.  We’re a long way from the latter happening.

Bad for oil producers–in fact, energy producers of any stripe, great for everyone else.

oil? ebola? the dollar?–why stock prices have been falling

October 14, 2014 By in Consumer Staples, Current Market Thoughts, economics, emerging markets, Energy, EU financial crisis, Industry Analysis, Mining, oil and natural gas, Securities regulation, shale oil and gas Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

In many ways, stock market commentators have an unenviable task.  At any given moment they have to come up with new and interesting reasons why stocks are rising or falling.   The media gurus’ difficulties are compounded by the fact that most are story presenters who have little understanding of investing and are therefore reliant on sources whose statements are many times influenced by their own private agendas.

After peaking in mid-September, US stocks have fallen by about 7% through yesterday/  This has erased most of their year-to-date price gains, although with dividends factored in the S&P is still up about 4% since New Year’s Day.

Among the current “explanations’ for the fall are:

–a falling oil price.  I don’t think this makes sense.  It would be one thing if world GDP were turning negative and demand were sagging as a result.  The current issue, however, is oversupply, being caused by the rise of shale oil/gas production in the US.

Yes, 10% of the S&P 500 consists of oil-related stocks, many of which are hurt by lower prices.  But, to simplify a bit, the other 90% of the index is a beneficiary.  Lower prices are bad for oil-producing nations in the Middle East, for Russia and for the rest of OPEC.  But they’re great for consumers.

Another point:  today’s production contracts with national oil companies provide that virtually all revenue from oil price increases above a certain level goes to the host country, not to the international oil firm that is developing the petroleum deposits.  Although this has been true for decades, my sense is that many investors still don’t get this.  The dynamic is much more consumers gain/emerging countries lose than the consensus thinks.

–ebola.  More about this tomorrow.  Ebola is scary.  The only model we have for what happens to stocks once investors become aware of pandemic possibilities is SARS.  On the other hand, Doctors Without Borders has been handling ebola patients for many years without a single infection of their own.  In my view, stocks would be way lower than they are today if investors viewed ebola a real threat.

–the dollar.  This is an issue, although almost no one is talking about it. The US dollar has risen against the euro by almost 10% since early May.  In back-of-the-envelope terms, 25% of the earnings of the S&P 500 is sourced in euro.  A 10% fall in the dollar value of the euro means that overall S&P earnings–without factoring in current Euroland economic weakness–will be 2.5% lower than previously thought.  Discounting this outcome would explain about half the recent market decline.

my take:

–technicals.  At the peak a few weeks ago, stocks had already discounted all the S&P earnings growth that’s likely for 2014.  In addition, the market had already also factored into prices, let’s say, a third of the expected earnings growth for the index next year. This is normal market behavior, granted, though, that we haven’t seen “normal” for the better part of a decade.

By September, potential short-term buyers couldn’t justify paying higher prices for stocks.  In addition, euro weakness + a lot of other miscellaneous stuff had put 2015 profits under threat.

We’re now in the process of determining how low prices have to go to bring buyers back.

Looking at past levels where lots of buying and selling has taken place ends up being a surprisingly effective tool for figuring out where buying will emerge again.  Don’t ask me why.  If this rule of thumb holds true, as I read the charts the key levels are 1840-80 (i.e., where we are as I’m writing this) and 1800.