I spent the early days of my career at The Wall Street Journal — this is the mid to late ‘90s we’re talking about — in the paper’s Dallas bureau. It was there that I learned all I need to know about the oil market and how to make a small fortune.

My job back then was to effectively wander the state of Texas, writing a weekly investment column on the opportunities I came across in my travels and my interviews. It was on one of those wanderings that I came across an old oil hand in Houston who’d made a name for himself as one of the industry’s savviest investors.

His office, decorated with Western art and overlooking the Houston skyline from about 20 floors up, smelled of long-dead cigarettes. His voice was gravelly; his face a topography map of the American West. And over the course of a couple of days — and several conversations on the phone — he shared with me much of what he’d learned in the decades he’d spent investing in oil.

I walked away from those lessons and immediately added shares of Diamond Offshore Drilling to my portfolio. I bought the stock in the teens and rode it to more than $100 a share. After listening to my personal oil-field oracle, I reflexively understood why oil, then fetching a niggling price in the low teens, was about to launch to unimagined highs. It was the simple story of supply and demand and sentiment.

That same story confronts us again two decades later, and it’s why I am so bullish on oil-field service stocks at a time when they’re about as well-loved as an ISIS terrorist.

Here’s the story as it played out in the late ‘90s. You will undoubtedly recognize some similarities today.

By the spring of 1999, the oil patch was in a terrible funk. Prices had fallen more than 40% to just $15 a barrel from near $30 just two years earlier. I remember some West Texas stripper-well owners out in the panhandle joking with me that water was worth more than oil, and maybe they’d be better off investing in divining rods and wandering around the dusty scrubland looking for a gusher of H2O instead.

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