Monday, February 25, 2008

The 5 Best Natural Gas Plays To Keep On The Radar: XTO, APA, CHK, SWN, UPL

Remember, last week T. Boone said he was short of natural gas.

From Wang's Happy Trading:

Yes the commodity boom and how to profit from it. In some ways we can see a little Mr. Plainview in all of us can’t we? Now we have computers to mine for our profits and UNG could be the next big thing as it has been lagging the other commodities. I really like this article from Seeking Alpha recently, nicely conveying on a bar chart a one year price change of the major commodities. What is of note when I look at it, is not how much the others have gone but how much the others have lagged. Nickel, zinc, aluminum and natural gas have been diverging from the other hot performers in its space and I do expect this divergence to converge which is already happening as we speak. Natural gas is cheap when compared to the others based on price and price appreciation (time to play catch up). Sometimes you don’t look for answers but you look for new questions to answer. Here is a recent article on Seeking Alpha on the NG space itself and its bullish thoughts on the fundamental basis for NG going forward.
Here are my favorite NG stocks to keep an eye on going forward.

XTO Energy
XTO has got some good quarterly revenue growth at 32.9%. On Feb. 12th, XTO reported earnings of $0.96 vs. consensus of $0.92 and revenues of $1.59 billion vs. consensus of $1.54 billion. It also reported acquiring more than 35 million cubic feet of natural gas per day to the company’s already growing production base for $1 billion. Cramer like XTO and Fast Money likes XTO....MORE