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Gold/Mining/Energy : Strictly: Drilling and oil-field services -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MARK BARGER who wrote (58553)	1/14/2000 5:50:00 PM
From: IndioBlues	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

OPEC Committee Recommends Extending Output Cuts Beyond March By Andy Webb-Vidal OPEC Committee Recommends Extending Oil Output Cuts (Update1) Vienna, Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries should extend oil output cuts beyond their current expiry in March to ensure prices remain near nine-year highs, an OPEC committee said. The production cuts, which have caused the oil price to more than double in a year, should be kept because world oil inventories are still too high, OPEC's Ministerial Monitoring Committee said. ``In light of the continuing market volatility and the remaining high stock levels, all those present at the meeting agreed to strongly recommend the extension of the current agreement,' said Fernando Garay, an OPEC spokesman. Crude oil rose as much as $1.41, or 5.3 percent, to $28.10 a barrel in New York, its highest price since January 1991. OPEC accounts for about 40 percent of world oil supply. ``Now we have suffered so much from the low price, I'm not worried about the high price' said Bijan Namdar Zanganeh oil minister for Iran, OPEC's second-biggest producer, a member of the committee. Zanganeh said a decision on how long any extension of the cuts should last would be taken at a meeting in March. The recommendation from the MMC, which reviews how closely OPEC members have followed their program of restricting output cuts, follows similar calls by the group's top producers, including the world's biggest supplier, Saudi Arabia. OPEC made almost 80 percent of the cuts they promised in December, Garay said. A Bloomberg survey estimated the 10 members of OPEC that are parties to the agreement to limit output made 82 percent of their promised cuts in December, down from 85 percent in November. All OPEC nations except Iraq had agreed to trim output by 4.316 million barrels a day, or about 6 percent of world supply, from February 1998 levels. They made cuts of 3.532 million barrels a day in December, the Bloomberg survey of producers, oil companies and analysts showed. Before the meeting, Zanganeh said he expected a consensus among OPEC members to renew the quotas, which are due to expire at the end of March, until the end of September. ``We think we are going to get a unanimous decision,' he said.

To: MARK BARGER who wrote (58553)	1/14/2000 6:32:00 PM
From: enervestor	Respond to of 95453

Mark, you need to look at the big picture. In 98, the world economy was slowing down, OPEC was overproducing, interest rates were falling, and most of the "smart" people thought we were facing a global recession. Today, we are in a mirror image of that picture. That said, energy is about a fourth of my portfolio at this time, as I am also invested in other sectors. I have been very surprised by the prices people are willing to pay for some of the techs and biotechs of my portfolio, but rather than trying to guess when the party ends, I have moved some money here as a defensive hedge. While these stocks won't turn into QCOMs, the risk/reward ratio here is much more to my liking.