With a market-thumping 24% return, ‘Energy’ was the top performing S&P sector in 2016. The incredible gains of last year stoked high expectations going into 2017.
Let’s take a look at how oil and gas prices behaved during the first three months of this year.
Q1 Report Card: Prices Move Lower but Recover from Year-Ago Lows
Despite hope offered by the biggest oil deal in a decade and a new pro-fossil fuel administration in the White House, crude prices logged a loss of almost 6% for the first quarter as traders focused on the rising flood of U.S. shale-driven production. In other words, while OPEC’s moves to trim output and rebalance the demand-supply situation has stabilized the market to a large extent, in the process it has incentivized shale drillers to churn out more. With the recent uptick in U.S. shale production putting more pressure onto the market, oil ended the first quarter at $50.60 per barrel, 5.8% lower than year-end 2016 prices.
Natural gas fared worse, dropping more than 14% in the Jan-Mar period, thanks to one of the mildest winters on record. A warmer winter translated into tepid requirement for the heating fuel and upended demand forecasts.
Despite the sequential fall, both oil and natural gas prices are in a sweet spot compared to the corresponding period of 2016. While crude slumped to a 12-year low, natural gas futures dropped to its worst level in almost 17 years.
Year-over-Year Gains Leads to Bullish Expectations
Ending the dismal trend from the past few quarters, a look back at the Q4 earnings season reflects that the overall results of the Oil/Energy sector finally turned the corner, driving the aggregate growth picture for the S&P 500 index.
The Oct-Dec 2016 period turned out to be a rather good one with the OPEC deal and extreme weather conditions engineering a hefty rise in oil and gas prices during the fourth quarter.
A historic OPEC production cut agreement, together with help from non-OPEC producers saw oil prices end the year at $53.72 a barrel, representing a gain of 11.4% sequentially and 45% for the year. Meanwhile, natural gas embarked on its own upward journey, with futures jumping around 25% just in the fourth quarter. Ending the year at $3.724 per million Btu (MMBtu) – up 59% from 2015 – the heating fuel was buoyed by a cold snap that translated into strong demand.
