Liam Denning, Columnist

Feeling All the Feels in Energy Stocks

When a sector is this unloved, cold, hard numbers matter more than emotions.

December 18, 2018 at 4:47 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.

Energy stocks know the feeling.
Photographer: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images Europe

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If there’s any sector that wishes numbers were meaningless and feelings were currency, it’s energy. On second thought, maybe even feelings wouldn’t be much help.

Brent crude is below $60 a barrel; West Texas Intermediate is under $50. And this after OPEC and its entourage announced renewed supply cuts. Now the entire stock market is in a funk (hence President Donald Trump’s Tuesday morning appeal to emotion over numbers). When you consider that energy stocks didn’t buy into oil’s brief rally in late summer and early fall anyway, and you survey the wreckage in gasoline refining margins, it’s hard to escape the thought that demand may deserve more attention than supply.