Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.
What: SandRidge Energy Inc.'s (NYSE: SD) stock continues to take investors on a wild ride. It jumped by double-digits as the market opened this morning before fading a bit by midafternoon. Fueling today's volatility is the same thing that has pushed the stock around over the past few months: the price of oil. Crude is up 4% today after word of an agreement to cease fighting in Ukraine, which helped ease concerns over demand for Russian oil. This was enough to rally the price of crude oil and SandRidge Energy's stock.
So what: SandRidge Energy stock was priced over $7 a share last summer before going into a deep slide and bottoming out in January at just over a buck a share. It has now nearly doubled off that low, as it has rebounded along with the price of oil in recent weeks.
Almost all of the stock's recent movement has been linked to its leverage to oil. The only recent news to move the stock was a report that SandRidge is slashing its rig count by 75%. This move was necessary as the company can't make much money drilling for oil that costs less than $50 per barrel.
Now what: There's not a whole lot SandRidge Energy can do at the moment. Its core drilling area needs sustainably higher oil prices in order to make a decent return on operations. The company will need to do its best to tread water until the price of oil improves just to control its debt, which has already been a huge weight on the stock.
