The Sweet and Sour Economics of Refining
It’s important that investors understand what they are buying. The biggest gains I’ve made over the years were in companies whose business I understood well. The biggest losses have been in companies that I didn’t understand nearly as well.
During the tech stock bubble from 1997 to 2000, a lot of people – including me – made and then lost money on companies we didn’t really understand. I wasn’t sure exactly what
JDS Uniphase (NasdaqGS: JDSU) did, but I did know that the talking heads on CNBC and at MSN Money believed that the sky was the limit.
But I didn’t understand its business. Who were the competitors? What were the threats? I didn’t really know and over time it became very clear to me that I was simply gambling, not investing. I was taking the advice of people who in many cases didn’t understand these businesses themselves, but who had an impressive track record primarily because they had been making their recommendations during a bull market for technology stocks. When the stock price of JDSU started to fall, I was uncertain whether to sell, because I didn’t really understand the long-term prospects.
With that in mind, US refiners have been on a hot streak lately. In the past three months the share prices of
Valero Energy (NYSE: VLO),
Tesoro (NYSE: TSO), and
Marathon Petroleum (NYSE: MPC) (all of which have been recommended here) have appreciated by 61%, 44%, and 52% respectively.
But oil refining has historically been a highly cyclical business. Get in at the right time and you can make a lot of money quickly. Get in at the wrong time and you can lose a lot just as quickly. This is why I caution against buying a refiner if you prefer to buy a stock for the next five years. I would have no major concerns about holding a large integrated oil company like
Chevron (NYSE: CVX) for that long, but the refiners require much closer monitoring.
So let’s examine the refining industry in some detail. Oil refiners convert crude oil into finished products such as gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, fuel oil and asphalt. But there can be significant differences among refiners. Recently we have seen refiners in the Midwest and on the Gulf Coast making record profits, while those on the East Coast are going bankrupt. The separator is generally the type of crude oil the refinery can process, which is a function of logistics and equipment.
When a refinery purchases crude oil the key piece of information, besides price, is what the crude oil assay – or composition analysis – looks like. The assay gives valuable information on the types of products that can be produced from the oil, as well as the degree of difficulty in refining it. You have probably heard terms like “light sweet”, or “heavy sour”, but how do these qualifiers affect the ability of a refiner to turn these crudes into products?
Let’s look at a pair of typical crude oil assays:
Rest of the article is in the link.
The Sweet and Sour Economics of Refining — JDSU, VLO, TSO, MPC, CVX — Investing Daily