EKS, I'd say my e&p positions (including suppliers to those companies), comprise somewhat more than 10% but less than 15% of my entire portfolios. That's the percentage based on lumping all that I have - all brokerage accounts and all cash funds, income/preferred funds and stocks. Not sure where I am with all the "parked monies" -- bond and preferred funds, utilities, cash . I guess if these are removed and I just consider plain ole stocks, then e&p related might represent between 15 and 20%
No e&p position is higher than 4% of my total portfolio value.
One of my largest holdings and biggest losers is still ATPG.
I have perhaps 25 different e&p companies, with three or four being very outsize (relative to the others).
I am trying to establish positions in several oil (not gas) shale plays. It's basically a bet on the success of horizontal drilling. What I want to do is buy into these positions now, before the crowd. I measure the crowd by looking at e&p and shale discussions on other SI threads.
Imo, the current "popular" plays (2010 going into 2011) in the general media seem to be the Bakken shale (Three Forks/Sanish) (or area, if technically it's not shale) and Eagle Ford (in Texas). Eagle Ford apparently has drawn quite a bit of interest from very positive comments made by EOG which has accumulated a big acreage. (I hold a few EOG shares). For Bakken, some examples I have are AXAS, BSIC, USEG. The Bakken extends into Canada (or if you're Canadian the Bakken drops into the US -gg-). I'm interested (own) Canadian-based companies that either operate in the Canadian Bakken and/or especially have operations in the US. Some of these seem to be (I am guessing) fairly obscure -- such as Freehold (FRHLf.pk), Reliable Energy (REL.v), Primary Petroleum (PIE.v), Nuloch (NLR_A). Of course there are the larger companies - Petrobakken, Petrobank, Crescent Point, etc.
My bet is that the up-and-coming shale play (2011 going into 2012) will be the Niobrara. I am trying to acquire shares in every small publicly-traded e&p company that has land holdings there. Some of the value, I am hoping, is not yet reflected in their stock prices. That is, land that was leased for $5/acre a few years ago, is now selling for $2000-5000/acre in some areas. So the early movers into the area, have an advantage. This may (or may not) be true of companies with holdings and operations in the Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Wattenberg Field area of the Niobrara. Anyway, I have positions in SYRG, WRES, SSN (large), DPTR.
There are a few companies that have holdings in several or all of the above areas. This includes MHR, ROSE, SDCJF.
If these recent horizontal drilling techniques will give economic life to geological formations here in the US, it only seems natural to me that I would be interested in these same geological formations that might occur in other countries. So I'm betting on horizontal drilling in France (HES, TRGL), Poland (FXEN), Australia (BPT), Turkey (TAT).
I'll just add that I'm setting up positions for what I believe (guess) will be North American shale plays going into 2013 (Cardium, others).
And of course there are different e&p plays. Some North Sea e&p's look undervalued to me based on nav. And I like some plays in South America and Thailand.
More comments later. |
