Why Apache Stock Rocketed 20% Higher at the Open Today

Shares of energy company Apache (NASDAQ: APA) rose dramatically at the open of trading on July 30, by roughly 20%. The stock fell back to about a 13% gain by 10 a.m. EDT, but by 11 a.m., Apache was back up to a roughly 20% advance. Clearly there's some volatility in the shares today.

The big story was earnings, which is a little counterintuitive. The energy sector is deeply out of favor today because oil is in the midst of a painful supply/demand imbalance. Effectively, COVID-19-related economic shutdowns have led to way more oil being produced than is getting used, with the excess largely ending up in storage. It was so bad that oil actually traded below zero for a brief moment in time, meaning drillers were paying customers to take the fuel off their hands. It is going to take time for this imbalance to get fixed, suggesting that oil prices will remain low. So it shouldn't be much of a surprise to find that Apache posted an adjusted loss of $0.74 per share in the second quarter, well below the $0.11-per-share profit it earned in the same period of 2019.

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Source Fool.com