How To Play The OPEC Production Cut

We’ve been trying to leverage what we’re convinced will be a substantial OPEC accord on Wednesday, November 30th, and spent the last several columns outlining why we’ll see at least a six-month agreement to knock more than a million barrels a day of OPEC production off the market.

Now comes the time to find some stocks to play for the next week and going into the rest of the year. Here, I’ve tried to point people towards some of the Permian shale players, who are already the hottest of the oil companies: Cimarex Energy (XEC), Concho Resources (CXO) and Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD), to name three of the hottest.

But it is true that many of these have become almost TOO well regarded, leaving some others in the oil space as perhaps more interesting mid-term plays for the coming meeting and beyond. Let me suggest two names to you: Oasis petroleum (OAS), a leveraged Bakken oil company, and Noble Energy (NBL), an underestimated player who will benefit from their assets in the Niobrara shale.

These two names couldn’t be less like one another, but together they make a nice pair of oil companies. Let’s start with Oasis, the one that I had once included on my ‘walking dead’ list of oil companies, convinced that they’d be unlikely to make it out of the crude bust cycle without a restructuring.

Well, the bust cycle is hardly over, and I’m not yet entirely convinced that Oasis will make it. But I am…