Liam Denning, Columnist

Conoco’s 2020s Plan Is to Embrace the FUD

The oil company has refined fear, uncertainty and doubt into something useful.

November 19, 2019 at 6:38 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Ryan Lance, chairman and chief executive officer of ConocoPhillips Inc.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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ConocoPhillips knows how to please a crowd, even one as shrunken and beaten-down as energy investors. By Tuesday lunchtime, as Conoco’s analyst day was wrapping up in Houston, it was the only big U.S. oil and gas stock flashing green, what with oil prices slipping almost 3%.

This says a lot about why Conoco’s message resonates: It comes with a hefty dollop of FUD.