By Angela Harmantas
Will Hillary Clinton’s opposition to the Keystone pipeline stand up to the weak Canadian dollar over the course of the US presidential election? Today on Before the Bell we speculate whether the prospect of cheap oil from Canada will be enough to overcome a strong environmental lobby. Also, we’re looking at oil stocks with strong operational profitability, and updating you on two major stories we covered this week – here’s what you need to know today:
I wasn’t particularly surprised to hear on Wednesday that Hillary Clinton would not support the construction of the Keystone pipeline, should she be elected US president next year. Although she has voiced tepid support for the project in the past, she’s running on a Democratic ticket that has a strong environmental lobby and has made climate change one of her key talking points this year. It’ll be interesting to see, however, whether she retains this position throughout the entirety of the campaign, especially if the Canadian dollar continues to be weak and our oil is cheaply available.
Keeping within the oil sector, we’re looking at 5 profitable oil & gas stocks poised to defy China’s slowdown shock on SmallCapPower today. In this case, profitability is determined by calculating the difference between revenue derived from normal business activities and operating costs. It doesn’t take into account revenue a company receives from stock investments or real estate sales, for example. Are you familiar with the names on our list? I have to admit, I wasn’t save for two.
I thought I’d give you updates on a couple of stories I covered in Before the Bell this week: first, we talked yesterday about Volkswagen CEO’s Martin Winterkorn’s stubborn refusal to resign, but yesterday, he finally caved to the pressure and stepped aside. Where does Volkswagen go from here? It looks like more firings are likely Also, we crowned Martin Shkreli “the internet’s most hated man” after he raised the price of the drug Daraprim by more than 5000%. Yesterday he backtracked and promised to lower the price of the drug (although didn’t say what the new price would be). Was this not one of the stupidest moves by a CEO in recent memory? I’m sure a price increase could have been handled in a much better way if it was actually warranted. Not a great week for Martins, unfortunately.
Do you have a burning question you’d like answered by an investment expert or analyst? Let me know and I can post the answer here in the blog. Contact me by email at angela@smallcappower.com or on Twitter: @aharmantas.
