Back to the future?
I suspect that the next 10 years will be very similar to the later stages of the last industry consolidation, as this process continues. The economy and investors will see stable prices, which has largely been the case since the initial collapse. But we will also see prices that increase over time, which so far has also been the case. Oil will no longer be a free market, with the wild price cycles that entails, but a more managed one. In many respects, it will look much more like, say, the 1990s than the boom period (in oil prices) from 2003 to 2008 or the bust period from 2014 to recently.
Overall, the effects should be positive. Markets and the economy thrive on stability. While the collapse in oil prices was a tailwind for many sectors, the damage to the energy sector wiped out many of those gains. Moving forward, energy should be neither a significant headwind nor tailwind, but a solid foundation—which is what a sector this vital should be.
Brad McMillan is the chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial Network, the nation’s largest privately held independent broker/dealer-RIA. He is the primary spokesperson for Commonwealth’s investment divisions. This post originally appeared on The Independent Market Observer, a daily blog authored by McMillan.