North Korea is sorry it set off an atomic bomb! That’s what they told a delegation from China. This coming 3 days after they declared war against the U.S. Condi better watch out or her job will be outsourced to the Chinese with results like that. Anyway, I guess that’s one less area of trouble to worry about. Case closed.
Opec Watch: Oil is up $0.18 at $58.68 in early trading over Opec’s cut (see previous post where I wrote more than enough on the matter). Thankfully, all the ministers are returning home to crank production valves to the right (or just pretend to in some cases) so we won’t have to really worry about these guys again until December 14.
Analyst watch: Quiet. Would you want to downgrade anyone who sells so much as a bucket of oil on a day like today?
An actual news story detailing how oil companies are going to earn less with falling prices! Shocker but it has some insights and while I have tremendous respect for Oppenheimer’s Fadel Gheit, that morgan stanley analyst is dead wrong in his assertion that XOM “has rarely been as inexpensive on a variety of conventional of measures as it is today, either in relation to the industry or the overall market” What measures would those be? Trailing earnings or last year’s price inflated PV10 measure of reserves? On this blog, we try to look forward and the apathetic growth rates, combined with almost certainly lower commodity prices next year lead to down earnings pal. See my thought on XOM here.
Earnings Watch:
–SLB: Revenue: $4.95 B vs 4.94 B expectation; $0.81 vs $0.77 expectation; oilfield service revenue slowed to 4% seq gro, while seismic remained strong. Pretty good quarter, lots of bullish regional comments save for Canada which the company indicated was seeing activity slow down in higher cost CBM and shallow gas plays.
–ACI: 1st of the big coal companies to announce. Brick. Lowers production targets in 4Q and ‘07, 2006 guidance of $1.60 to 1.70 well off current estimate of $1.97. Stock is down 6% bmo. Play may be BTU if you can grab puts early.
