Trading the oil spike: These stocks tend to closely follow crude's moves
For those wanting to trade the recent move in oil, looking at stocks that are highly correlated to crude could help. West Texas Intermediate futures are up more than 6% this week, after OPEC+ announced production would be cut by more than 1 million barrels per day. That would also mark crude's first three-week winning streak since December. @CL.1 5D mountain Oil up big this week. Higher oil prices could put upward pressure on inflation and potentially force global central banks to keep rates elevated for longer than anticipated. This could have a negative impact on the broader stock market. However, it could also mean gains for some companies. CNBC Pro looked at the 100-day rolling correlations of S & P 500 stocks to West Texas Intermediate futures to see which names tend to follow oil the closest. We screened for those names with current correlations of 0.5 or more. We also filtered for stocks with average correlations dating back to 2015 of 0.5 or more. In other words, a 1% move on WTI would be associated with a 0.5% gain on the stock. Perhaps not surprising, the 13-most positively correlated stocks to oil are energy names. In other words, when oil rises, these stocks tend to follow it higher. APA has the highest current correlation coefficient out of any name at 0.67, followed by Marathon Oil , Hess and SLB . APA and Marathon, which also have average correlations of 0.55 and 0.61, respectively, are both up more than 5% this week, while Hess has jumped more than 6%. SLB, meanwhile, is up 2.7%. There are, however, some stocks that tend to struggle when crude rises. Clorox and General Mills both have negative current correlations to oil. In other words, when oil rises, these stocks have fallen lately. That said, their average correlations going back to 2015 is relatively flat, the data shows. Both stocks are underperforming oil this week, with Clorox losing 0.1% and General Mills advancing just 1.7%. To be sure, correlations don't always hold up, and idiosyncratic drivers for each stock could play a bigger roll in how they trade than do the moves in a commodity. In other words, a high positive correlation between a stock and a commodity shouldn't be the sole factor driving an investment thesis.