Liam Denning, Columnist

Exxon Mobil and Chevron Help Fuel Investor Revolt

The latest results from oil majors won't win shareholders back, with Exxon looking particularly vulnerable.

January 31, 2020 at 6:11 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.

Investors’ benefit of the doubt is in exceedingly short supply.
Photographers: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg (Mobil); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (Chevron)

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You can’t turn a supertanker quickly, as the old saying goes. Bailing out, on the other hand, takes no time at all.

Friday’s double dose of weak Big Oil earnings from Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. followed hard on the heels of Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s debacle on Thursday. Shares of both companies were down about 4%. The market was ahead of them, though: Last Monday, energy’s weighting in the S&P 500 Index slipped below 4% for the first time in at least four decades. Incredibly, that weighting is now less than half a percentage point above that of the utilities sector: