There are black swans and there are Black Swans... but this swan somehow can give birth to many little black swans. The world is already trying to come to terms with Covid 19. Central banks have cut rates, governments have put through fiscal packages to alleviate the economic effects. Now suddenly we have the oil plunge.
Let's be sober here, Saudi Arabia is cutting its nose to spite the face. Even though their cost of oil production is a lot less than Russia, its not that cheap. The strategy is to get Russia to come kowtowing for the March 18th meeting. NO ONE affiliated with OPEC wants the current situation, no one wants USD25 to prevail. Would you keep going to work if you KNOW FOR A CERTAINTY you have to pay the employer RM1,000 a day??!!
Hence it is a short term strategy, but I would still avoid oil & gas stocks for the time being because sentiment is bigger than facts now.
Last time I heard: low oil prices is good for the global economy, generally. Why are we reacting this way??? Are the OPEC countries a substantive consumer of global goods??? Rhetorical indeed.
If G7 and G15 can come together so quickly to address Covid 19, don't you think calls will be buzzing across continents to say WTF ... we don't need this shit now?!!
If you are among the lucky ones who are not exposed that much to the markets, and can take a 1-3 months view at least, you should put your money to work, even in some local stocks.
That's because there are some great second liners that have been hammered 15%-30% over the last few days alone. Just look for the ones with least exposure to disrupted supply chains owing to the virus and not entirely correlated to oil prices, plus they are profitable and cash flow positive.
The list is meant for readers to go and do their own research and not a call to buy blindly.
MYEG - (Recent high 1.38, today 1.03) How da hell is oil prices important here? Slowdown in economy, ok a bit, but you know our we have car registration, etc... that is humdrum transactions but must go one.
NOTION VTECH (Recent high 1.38, today 72.5 sen) - Last quarter made net profit of RM14.2m, bonus issue coming up soon. Chairman reiterated that they are actually benefitting from the breakdown in supply parts. Project Nixon (EMS codename) need 600k pieces of aluminium tubing for vacuum cleaners worth RM4.5 mil sales per month from June 2020 onwards. Project Stingray (Extrusion solutions codename) is a major expansion of the extrusion business from 200 tons per month capacity to 1000 tons capacity and billet furnace for upstream recovery of aluminium leftovers. Mainly for external customers. Notion is transforming the group into an aluminium total solutions company more than precision machining or fabrication.
DIALOG - (Recent high 3.45, today 3.03) This company stands to benefit as an oversupply of oil will require companies to find storage space. Probably at Pengerang SPV1.
