Oil Service Stocks vs. Big Oil Stocks

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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By Vitaliy Katsenelson

T. Boone Pickens knows oil better than most people out there, definitely better than me. However, his calling into CNBC seemed like a desperate attempt to influence oil prices. 

I’m not a big fan of large oil companies as most of them have little or no organic production growth and they are completely at the mercy of oil prices, but I am getting interested in oil service stocks for several reasons:

Oil service stocks are not as sensitive to oil prices as long as prices stay about $30+, oil companies will be making holes in the ground at a nice pace.

  • They are better businesses – oil companies need to spend billions of dollars just to replenish their reserves (maintenance capex), then they have to spend billions on top of that to grow sales – not great businesses. Oil service stocks are on the receiving side of this capex and have relatively small maintenance capex. If the industry’s growth slows down, oil companies will still be spending billions on capex to replenish dwindling reserves (good for oil services stocks), where oil service companies will see a tremendous increase in their free cash flows which means high dividends and share buybacks.

http://www.contrarianedge.com/

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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