With the revival of oil prices over the past year, numerous companies in the industry have seen their year-over-year profits increase significantly and many have even been posting strong quarter-over-quarter increases. This is good news for shareholders as higher profits should lead to higher dividends and higher stock prices. This is not always the case over a short-term basis though, so in this series we take a brief high level look at the weekly and intra-monthly performance of six large cap oil companies to provide a proxy for the performance of the industry as a whole. 

ExxonMobil 

ExxonMobil (XOM) delivered almost completely flat performance last week, although it was quite volatile with the stock alternating up and down days. The company opened the week of December 11 at $82.95 per share and closed the week at $83.03 per share. This gives the stock a return of 0.1% over the week. 

Source: Fidelity Investments 

However, the stock’s two-week performance was somewhat disappointing with it posting a relatively large decline over the December 4 – December 6 period. It began to recover after this, with some slight volatility but failed to reach its December 4, 2017 opening price. On December 4, ExxonMobil opened at $83.21. This gives the stock an overall relatively modest loss of 0.22% over the two-week period. 

Source: Fidelity Investments 

By far the most significant news item affecting ExxonMobil last week and the only one likely to have had an impact on the stock price was the news that the company struck oil off of the coast of Equatorial Guinea on December 11. The company is still attempting to evaluate the size of this find however and a small find would be unlikely to have economic viability when we consider the costs of developing an offshore oil field. This news appears to have had little impact on the stock price as it declined on the same day as the release. 

Chevron

Chevron (CVX) also delivered a loss to investors last week, although in this case the loss was much greater than what ExxonMobil experienced. The stock was also not nearly as volatile as ExxonMobil’s, thus the opportunity for trading was somewhat more limited. The stock opened the week at $120.29 per share and closed the week at $119.73 per share. This gives the stock a loss of 0.47% over the week.