Every week since 1944, Baker Hughes Inc. has released a survey of how many rigs were out drilling for U.S oil and gas. And every week, oil and gas traders would, for the most part, ignore it.
What a difference a $50-a-barrel slide in oil makes.
This past Friday, traders were bent over their desks, staring at their screens, waiting for the noon release of the report to see whether drillers extended their biggest-ever retreat from U.S. oil fields. (They did.) Oil futures spiked within minutes of the count, closing at the highest level in four days.
"I don't think I've heard 'Baker Hughes' more in my life than I have in the past month," said Dan Flynn, a trader at Price Futures Group in Chicago. "It's like I'm saying it in my sleep."
The sudden interest in Houston-based Baker Hughes's rig counts shows how desperate traders have become to find the bottom of the oil market after the biggest collapse since 2008. The company, which was Hughes Tool Co. 71 years ago when it first released the weekly count, is the third-biggest oil field service provider in the world.
"The company has distributed the rig count for about 70 years, and has typically seen an increase in interest when commodity prices are more volatile," Melanie Kania, a Baker Hughes spokesman in Houston. "The recent drop in oil prices is no exception."
The slide in prices has sidelined 480 rigs within two months, erased tens of thousands of jobs and cut hundreds of billions of dollars in spending.
"The bulls are jumping on what's become one of the few bullish data points out there for oil," said Tim Evans, energy analyst at Citi Futures Perspective in New York. "It seems to be the short-term traders trading around the release of the number, even when underlying oil production is still trending higher."
Despite drillers using the fewest rigs in almost four years, the nation will pump 9.3 million barrels a day this year, the most since 1972, Energy Information Administration forecast last week.
This surging output from bigger, more prolific U.S. shale wells is exactly what rendered the weekly rig changes a moot point years ago. So much so that the U.S. government came up with a new way of gauging output and oil trader Patrick Sullivan said he actually forgot the numbers were due out last Friday.
"It wasn't until oil prices moved up that I was looking at the numbers," said Sullivan, a trader for Ronin Capital LLC in New York. "I knew about the numbers for a long time, but nobody was ever watching them; well, nobody until two weeks ago."
More than 6,800 front-month West Texas Intermediate contracts changed hands in the three minutes after Baker Hughes released the rig count on Feb. 13. That was up from the roughly 800 traded in the three minutes leading up to it. Three weeks earlier, 1,320 lots traded immediately after the report.
U.S. oil benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude for March delivery jumped $1.57 a barrel, or 3.1 percent, to settle at $52.78 that day. Prices have gained each of the past three Fridays.
For the first time in almost 20 years of writing market commentary, Evans said he sat at his desk last Friday waiting for the rig counts to show up so he could analyze them and send a special report to clients.
"Maybe a month ago was the first time that I ever saw the price really move after the headlines on the rig counts hit the wire," he said. "You've got bond traders driving electric vehicles who wouldn't recognize an oil well if it were in their back yard, and now even they know Baker Hughes."
Business on 02/19/2015