Recent Posts

Sunday Penguins

Week ahead: Fed decision and plenty of earnings. Last week was a big one for markets, to say the least. Mega-cap tech bombing the tape. Worked out great for the oils and energy. A client said my chart of oils’ share of market earnings are too low: I have the group at 5% of the S&P500, but 10% of the earnings of the market, he is getting energy earnings at 15% of the market, which […]

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6:27 PM

Morning Idi

Gossip from dinner with my London lawyer friend who is familiar with, let’s say, “emerging markets law”: Russia’s power rests between the Oligarchs who have the money, vs the military, that have the weapons. The single crossover oligarch, who controls the military, is Putin alone. Can the oligarch class form an ex-Putin alliance with the military? Difficult. Rational analysis of Nordstream pipeline explosions, which logically would conclude that Poland done it, with NATO deep state […]

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6:28 AM

Sunday CRC

I asked a major activist investor if I should zip over to Denver this week for the Enercom conference, (starts tomorrow). It’s a staple of the August energy conference diet, which is not a rich diet. Enercom, you pay to attend and a plethora of smaller oil & gas exploration and production companies make presentations with meet & greet. I’ve been once and a client told me as I headed there, the first time he […]

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11:41 PM

What are you doing? Reading transcripts

The two weeks, mid-earnings, when we pull together company results transcript comments, are not a science, they are an impressionistic art; a colour to our themes. Basically these are comments that caught our eye over the past week. Like sellside analysts, the companies tend to all present the same more-or-less generic message, but occasionally, as we strive with Sankey Research, a comment stands out, is differentiated, or so wild that it is worthy of note. […]

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2:25 PM

Sunday Sankey

Quick read today as you got a longer note yesterday on LNG, and I am running late. Just pictures today, and Betsey asked to be on the cover of the Sunday Sankey so it’s a presentation. All the fun favourite charts. Key slides: next week’s earnings highlights starting with Valero. Relative performance, oils performance, high free cashflow yields, and a cash return chart that will be updated on a rolling basis through earnings. Earnings calendar […]

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5:46 PM

LNG: Gordon & Gorgon

This LNG round up with Gordon Shearer (Poten & Partners guru) from Thursday night took longer to write and I got tangled in the SLB results, which came in okay – readers will know I am not pushing service companies but love oils… “to 10% of S&P500!” Chatting to a client with Midstream expertise before Gordon Shearer, LNG expert, came on Strategy Session Thursday evening, the view was that Kinder Morgan results were decent owing […]

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5:43 PM

Tilting at Windmills

Well, that was quite the Q1 2022! But we got it in the books. I think the low point of Q1 for me was the evening of Thursday 3rd March, shortly after the 24th February Russia-Ukraine invasion, when the largest nuclear plant in Europe, Zaporizhzhia, appeared to be under direct attack and burning, right as I had a one-hour briefing with the State Dept, and my contact told me that surviving a nuclear attack is […]

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11:52 AM

Sunday Targets

This week, a three page thematic overview, followed by supporting charts. First the text, then the charts. ~ Noted refinery explosion last evening, no deaths reported, at ExxonMobil’s small (“only” 60kb/d) Billings Montana niche refinery that is important for local balances. Would drive margins higher for Midcon players such as HollyFrontier, Coffeyville, Delek, and West Coast PBF, and might accelerate ExxonMobil’s long standing attempts to sell the plant (price always said to be too high). […]

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3:22 PM

Sunday Sankey 6/6/21

Welcome to summer, hope you are enjoying breaking out your white pants after Memorial Day. Time to drop $250 on new sunglasses. Get in quick before they are $400.   There is no presentation today as I am working on an oil company Board Presentation for Tuesday in Texas. Ramp spending by increasing debt… might actually be the call, or at least the outside-the-box option, notably to make an acquisition. This week I learned what […]

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1:35 PM

Sunday Sankey 5/23/21

Watching Iran, but 1mb/d of oil exports are already in the market. Huge week ahead for ExxonMobil, with the Shareholder Meeting and board vote on Wednesday this week. We wrote about it on Thursday, see the note on www.sankeyresearch.com or emailed. Noted that Halliburton shareholders rejected the company’s pay proposal last week, which is encouraging. The pay of oil executives relative to shareholder returns has been an abomination for years. Executives should try a few […]

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12:19 PM

Sunday Sankey 5/2/21

All presentation today, see attached link, after the Sunny Saturday Sankey published yesterday and emailed to you, outlined the past week. The week ahead is extremely busy with results – you can see my diary in the attached presentation. The monster week of earnings is behind us, with impressive results from FMAGA – Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Alphabet. Week ahead also has Secretary of State Blinken travelling to Ukraine. “I can’t tell you that we […]

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12:25 PM

Sunny Saturday Sankey 5/1/21

Winner winner chicken dinner: Hess this past week. ExxonMobil, we think won of the mega-oils. Hess is the “last great oil NAV play” on Guyana, the stock is worth $100/share+ if you believe $80/bbl is coming down the strip; Goldman clearly does, we get there too, with a weak US$ and not dissimilar balances – a demand boom is coming. Wildcards vs GS are Iran and India, alongside the potential for rising US interest rates […]

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3:11 PM

Morning Sankey 4/22/21

Comparative advantage in ideas. Under the fundamental trade principle of comparative advantage (Ricardo, 1817), if you have two goods, and I have two services, we trade; to have one good and service each, more efficiently produced for each. Under a theory of trade of ideas, If we have two ideas each, and we trade; we each have four ideas. THAT’S RIGHT FOLKS, HAPPY HOUR IS BACK, TONIGHT AT 5PM. Muttering to myself about the latest […]

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8:25 AM

Sunday Sankey 4/11/21

This week I am heading to Oklahoma to meet Devon CEO Rick Muncrief and then Houston to bid farewell to outgoing ConocoPhillips COO Matt Fox. Opposite ends of the spectrum for me – never met Rick, have hung out many times over the years with Mr. Fox. The lowlight in professional terms with Matt was doing the first marketing trip for COP in NYC after the dividend cut in 2016. The highlight was Matt making […]

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1:36 PM

Morning Garland

Today we note who benefits from low natural gas prices, especially with propane prices ripping higher, and take a look at a key theme for Phillips 66 at our refining conference, the Dakota Access Pipeline. We will cover other themes for the big refiners this week as we run into our refining conference next Monday January 4th. Basically, a forgotten winner from low natgas prices is refining. Also Canadian heavy oil producers, like refiners, have […]

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9:13 AM

Election-free Sankey

*** This note is election commentary-free. We got definitive results last night. From Pioneer $PXD, Marathon Oil $MRO, Apache $APA, Energy Transfer $ET, and Delek $DK, boom, boom! Really notable sell-off on solar stocks which came into the past month flaming hot, and have seen major corrections led by Sunrun $RUN – 31% past month, SolarEdge -22% which compounded $RUN’s weakness with a guidance warning this week, and First Solar $FSLR down -15% this past […]

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8:17 AM

Friday Saturday Sankey

Yesterday was tricky to publish a worthy note, until conference calls were complete. So this is the Friday Sankey on a Saturday. Happy Halloween! If life gives you melons you may be dyslexic What’s Sherlock Holmes’ favourite tree? A lemon tree Daddy, do all fairy tales start with “Once upon a time”? “No kid, there’s a whole series of fairly tales that start with “If elected, I promise…”” There were two key takeaways from ExxonMobil’s […]

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2:51 PM
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