Buy GulfMark Offshore (GLF)

Suddenly they’re hitting gushers from the Gulf of Mexico to the South Atlantic off Brazil to the west coast of Africa off Ghana and Sierra Leone.

The oil from these finds will eventually become critical to global supply—once the global economic downturn is over. The downturn has brought us what the International Energy Agency projects will be a two year slump in demand. If the global economy recovers relatively quickly, the agency projects, we could be facing another supply squeeze by 2014.

But these finds themselves look like their end another oil industry slump well before that. Deep water exploration suddenly seems to be headed to a boom. And that means we’re likely to see rigs coming out of cold stacking and starting to earn day fees again well before 2011, the year that many analysts had picked for a turn in the drilling industry.

In other words, the way to play these big deep water discoveries now is by buying shares in the drilling companies most likely to profit from an earlier turn in the sector’s fortunes. Read more