Oil's Well
A veteran energy investor doesn't think opportunities are tapped out
online.barrons.com
In this week's interview (April 4, 2005), Art Smith, who heads up John S. Herold Inc., based in Norwalk, Conn., and Houston, oversees a team of analysts and maintains a proprietary database on 400 or so publicly held energy companies that's much in demand by money managers, oil and gas company executives and investment bankers.
In the interview Mr. Smith says that the oil services companies have much more room to run.
"If exploration and production stocks are hot, the hotter sector is the oil-equipment and service and drilling group, which after four or five years of being in the doldrums are now seeing 100% capacity utilization. Pricing is going ballistic. We at Herold are not the best guys to talk to about oil services, but we can see that group heating up. All the rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are utilized, and it is a worldwide phenomenon."
He goes on to say, "The oil-service companies for the next year or two will enjoy great prosperity, but the question is how much of that is already factored into the share prices. The big names there would be Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes and rig companies such as Transocean and Global Santa Fe."
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