The oil and gas industry as a whole continues to perform well, primarily due to strong Brent crude prices. We have also seen events such as President Trump’s proxy war on Iran continue to make headlines as well as the continual headlines about Russia. There have also been rumblings about a possible strike in the North Sea as the UK’s largest labor union rejected the pay offer presented by the Offshore Contractors Association. If this situation escalates, it could see rising oil prices in relatively short order due to the large volumes produced by the region. Now, let’s take a look at how the oil and gas industry stocks that are tracked by this report have held up.
ExxonMobil
ExxonMobil (XOM) delivered a gain last week, steadily increasing during every day of the week. The company opened the week of September 17 at $83.00 per share and closed the week at $85.17 per share. This gives the stock an overall return of 2.61% over the week.
Source: Fidelity Investments
The stock’s two-week performance was also quite impressive, posting a fairly substantial gain over the period, due partly to ending only one day in the red. Overall, it went from $82.23 to $85.17 per share over the two-week period for a gain of $2.94, which works out to 3.53%. Shareholders should be relatively pleased with this gain.
Source: Fidelity Investments
On Friday, ExxonMobil was rated outperform by RBC (RBC) due to the company finally addressing past mistakes such as failing to build up its project pipeline to replace dwindling production and reserves. RBC did not explicitly say what stimulated the upgrade however except for crediting high oil prices and a new project pipeline. Nonetheless, upgrades do tend to have positive impacts on share prices and ExxonMobil proved to be no exception here.
Chevron
Chevron (CVX) also delivered a gain to investors last week although its performance was slightly more erratic than ExxonMobil’s. This is because it declined slightly on Thursday, September 20 instead of delivering a gain as its peer company did. The stock opened the week at $117.61 per share and closed the week at $121.13 per share. This gives the stock a gain of 2.99% over the week.
Source: Fidelity Investments
Chevron’s stock price action was more or less consistently positive over the trailing two-week period, as it only delivered one day of negative performance. On Monday, September 10, Chevron’s stock opened at $115.43 per share. This gives the stock a total gain of 4.94% over the period, substantially better than what ExxonMobil delivered.
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