Credit Suisse prefers UK energy names, starts Global Energy at 'overweight'

Credit Suisse has started coverage of the Global Energy sector at 'overweight', arguing that forward prices are set to rise and pointing to cheap valuations as the main arguments in favour of their view.

Linked to the above, they expressed a "regional preference" for UK energy names.

In their opinion, the consensus forecast for $64 a barrel oil at year-end 2018 was "too pessimistic" and they expected the current backwardation in the market to diminish as they rose.

Above all, they believed the risk of a sharp increase in US tight oil production was low, projecting that output of shale oil and natural gas liquids was set to undershoot the Department of Energy's projection for growth of 2.0m barrels a day.

That was in part because of shale oil's focus on value as opposed to volume at present and the simple fact that US shale oil represented just 6% of global supply.

Like Barclays the day before, the Swiss broker called attention to how the sector had "de-coupled" from the oil price since mid-2017 and - to a lesser degree - from the forward curve.

Instead, it pointed out, the sector had been more closely tracking the five-year forward oil price.

The sector, admittedly, had also been looking "expensive" for several years.

Among the drivers of the oil price going forward, they said the market was underestimating: OPEC's ability to defend its output caps, higher depletion rates due to lower investment, the normalisation of production outages, and still robust demand thanks to the momentum in developed market economies.