Market Watch article today - Buy the worst? Here are 5 destroyed stocks for this bottom-fishing strategy....
"The top five performers on the S&P 500 year-to-date: Etsy ETSY (+243%), Nvidia NVDA (+141%), West Pharmaceutical Services WST (+96%), PayPal PYPL (90%) and Amazon AMZN (85%).
The losers: Occidental Petroleum OXY (-74%), Carnival Corp. CCL (-72%), Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings NCLH (-72%), Marathon Oil MRO (-68%) and TechnipFMC PLC FTI (-67%)."
Why am I not surprised?
Low oil price swings are a fact of our business. How the company is structured/managed to deal with this fact is a BOD and Leadership responsibility. Oxy being on the bottom five list is fully understandable with the poor timing of the Anadarko acquisition and the high price they paid for it. Why is Marathon at the bottom and no other independents? The other oil companies have done a much better job with asset diversification and cost control to weather this storm. Low pricings is one thing, but poor leadership by the BOD and senior leadership placed Marathon on the bottom five list. They own this relative poor performance to our peers, just like the employees are held during our annual reviews with the achievement cards. Relative performance is the measurement.
Low oil prices will always take MRO down, where it starts the decline is up to the leadership. Unfortunately we started this latest slide at a very low price.
That's exactly the point. You can't blame oil price for the bone-headed acquisitions and lagging stock price over the last few years.
BD actually shrunk the company by making acquisitions. The money that went out the door is significantly more than the entire current enterprise. Thanks PW!
I wouldn’t say it has anything to do with mismanagement...the commodity price is low. Obviously performance will be lower than previous is the product you’re selling is worth less on the open market.
Use some common sense here.
However, I think I lot of employees would’ve been happy to take a 20% paycut or more in order to keep working.
FML... I own 3 of those stock
"Marathons Board of Directors and company leadership squarely owns this poor performance."
Yet, they are still employed. Meanwhile, our co-workers are paying the price via layoffs because of their mismanagement of the company.
Unfortunately it hasn't just been in 2020. Even when times were "good", we were still lagging behind our peers and the market generally. Heck, even MPC was outperforming us post split.
I always get a kick out of the earnings calls when LT starts with his, "Investors should reward our execution, results, and blah blah blah. Why don't you guys like us?"
Marathons Board of Directors and company leadership squarely owns this poor performance.
Hopefully MRO employees don't own MRO stock. To pataphrase AL Pacino "don't get high on your own supply".
Good luck as the mergers proceed.