Liam Denning, Columnist

Frackers Are Even Less Popular Than When Oil Was at $10

Their own predilections for production and spending are to blame.

May 28, 2019 at 1:05 PM EDT

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.

A lonely business these days.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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Christmas 1998 wasn’t a happy time in the oil business. The price of Brent crude had just dipped below $10 a barrel. Within a month or so, energy’s weighting in the S&P 500, already low, would sink to just above 5%. The world was thought to be “drowning in oil,” while technology stocks – 21% of the market – were seemingly in short supply.

And yet, with oil trading at more than $70 a barrel as summer 2019 gets underway, energy stocks are somehow even less popular than they were back then:

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