Even Boone Pickens Is Falling Out of Love With Oil
The venerable oil baron’s ETF abandoning Brent crude for renewables says it all.
T. Boone Pickens in 2009.
Photographer: Ethan Miller/Getty Images North AmericaVenerable oil baron T. Boone Pickens is giving up on oil – sort of. Less than 18 months ago, his fund launched an ETF tracking stocks of companies expected to benefit from any increase in Brent crude oil prices. But soon, BOON – the ticker of the NYSE Pickens Oil Response ETF – will be no more. Instead, it will be relaunched as RENW, offering exposure to stocks benefiting from the transition to toward “a low-carbon economy.”
BOON’s most obvious problem was that it hadn’t really lived up to its ticker as far as investors are concerned. Underperforming the Brent oil price by about 7 percentage points since launch isn’t catastrophic. Worse perhaps is the fact that the ETF didn’t really partake in last fall’s oil rally (less than half its holdings are classified as “energy” companies). Still, that shielded it somewhat from the subsequent crash, unlike more heavily exposed E&P funds.