weekly prices

I get all this data off an excel spreadsheet that queries yahoo finance (I really wish I had access to a Bloomberg), and I forgot to save last week’s.  Hopefully there are no transcription errors here.  I wish I had a better index to use.  Neither of those two ETFs I use are ideal, and Yahoo doesn’t seem to have all the S&P subindexes.  I can find some but not others.  Ideally I would be using the S&P 500, energy, E&P sub-sub index.

Overall it was a strong week for the market, and for most of the diversified E&Ps.  People generally assume that the price of oil is likely to fall somewhat, or at least that it shouldn’t go higher.  This is reflected in the futures market.

I know this chart is barely readable; it was a photo taken of a Bloomberg screen at the free Bloomberg terminals in the NY Business library.  The white line is a WTI futures curve from four years ago, the blue from three, then the red from two, the light green from two, and finally the pinkish white (the one that starts at the highest point) from last week.  What each of these lines represents is the futures contract at intervals going 10 years into the future.  The key observation here is that in each passing year the expectation of future prices far in the future has decreased.  So even though the spot price now is higher than in the past four  years (on that specific date) the future price for five years out has gone down each time.  There have been a lot of issues with WTI because of the oversupply in the midcontinent (WTI is priced in Cushing Oklahoma), but the same basic trend also exists for Brent crude, the more relevant global benchmark now.

Overall for the week, the diversified larger E&Ps did well, along with the Bakken names.  Permian companies were generally flattish and the Marcellus companies were down with natural gas.