Now that it's 2007 all over again, and I am playing with oceanic oil drillers again, it's time to brush up on the subject.
- (Sep 4, 2007: I'm Buying One Group Today - Deep Sea Oil Drillers)
- (Sep 13, 2007: I found Goldman's Other Deep Sea Driller Pick - Atwood Oceanics)
- (Oct 11, 2007: Could it Finally be Time for the Deep Sea Drillers?)
Ah those were the days, writing 8 posts a day to an audience of 40 people. ;)
People often ask how do you know about so many stocks / sectors ... frankly, a lot of it is rehash. You do this long enough and you will have touched just about every sector and countless stocks. For example I spent the past 3 weeks reading up on JDS Uniphase (JDSU) and Finisar (FNSR). Folks, these are 1999 stocks; all I had to do was figure out what they were up to the past 11 years. ;) But I digress.
Earnings in this sector have been poor, but as I stated yesterday - if the oil
keeps rallying on HAL9000 buying fits, you must acquit. Of course if oil falls back in the days and weeks to come, ignore this entire entry. ;) I much prefer deep sea oil drilling versus shallow bodies of water since the contracts pay the most and last the longest period of time (i.e. stability) - not to mention Petrobras (
PBR) has been busy locking up much of the world's supply (
May 15, 2008: Petrobras Hordes the World's Deep Sea Oil Drillers) but there is limited selection of public companies in this group; certainly there is no pure play. When I first began the blog major player
GlobalSantaFe (GSF) was an independent company (which I owned) but was
gobbled up by Transocean (
RIG), creating the sector's heavyweight. ($28.5 Billion market cap)
As the next year progressed (remember summer 2007 to summer 2008 was a commodity boom time, even as the greater market struggled) we had our hands in 2 other names that I thought might be buyout candidates - Pride International (
PDE) ($5.5B mkt cap) which had turned from a land based driller to ocean (
Aug 19, 2007: Some Updates on Pride International) (
Sep 13, 2007: Kramer Agrees with me on Pride International - no, not Cramer...