After yesterday’s surprise agreement to cut production from OPEC, oil prices have continued to climb–West Texas Intermediate was up 3.07% to $50.96 as of 3:15 p.m. New York time this afternoon–but oil stocks have stalled with such leaders from yesterday as Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) down 0.84%, Parsley Energy off 1%, and RSP Permian (RSPP) lower by 1.46%.
Oil drilling and service stocks, on the other hand, have continued their strong rally with Patterson-UTI (PTEN) ahead 3.67%, Helmerich & Payne (HP) up 2.78%, Ensco (ESV) gaining 2.69%, and Transocean (RIG) climbing 3.76%. Seadrill (SDRL) led the group with a 9.68% gain.
Technology stocks continued their recent sell off and that, along with the stall in shares of energy producers, has left the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index down 0.33% as of 3:15.
Shares of Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOG) are all down modestly by 2.49%, 1.19%, and 1.4%, respectively. The big damage, though, has come in shares of technology hardware rater tun Internet software companies. Nvidia (NVDA) fell 5.33% as of 3:15 p.m.; and Qualcomm (QCOM) was off 5.9%, for example. One exception was Salesforce.com (CRM.) Shares of that Internet-based sales and marketing software company were down 4.94%. (I suspect that drop in Salesforce is related to the stock’s strong outperformance recently. The drop brings it back to the technology pack, as it were.)
