Uma das ações recomendadas é a Petrobrás:
PETROBRAS ENERGIA PZE, $11
We're on record as saying that $95 a barrel is not a sustainable price for oil. Yet The Hottest Fund Manager in America--a.k.a. CGM's Ken Heebner--now has us hedging our bets.
For those unfamiliar with Heebner, understand that his stock picking over the past eight years has been genius (as it has been for much of his 30-year career). He made a bundle short-selling tech and telecom stocks in 2000 He bet big on homebuilders in 2001 only to get out just before they crashed. He plowed his homebuilder profits into energy stocks in 2005 and eventually doubled down on commodities with a big bet on copper. The result: His CGM Focus fund was up 66% through early December--while juicing his returns with short positions on Indymac and Countrywide Financial, mortgage lenders whose stocks have been circling the drain.
With that kind of track record, we listened when Heebner laid out an argument that $100 oil is not only coming but will be here to stay. "There is still strong growth in Latin America, China, India, and a host of smaller countries like Poland and Thailand," he says. That means a need for some 1.5 million more barrels of oil a day. The problem, Heebner explains, isn't just finding another 1.5 million barrels; it's finding them even as some of the most productive oil fields in the world are declining.
Heebner, who is a fanatical researcher, questions the conventional view that OPEC has enough spare capacity to fill much of that void. Heebner cites one Saudi Arabian source whom he declines to name who asserts that output at Ghawar--a legendary Saudi field that produces about 6% of the world's oil--is declining at 9% a year. (The Saudi authorities vociferously dispute this.) "So I'm connecting all the dots," Heebner says. "It's a tight situation to start with, but add to that a loss of a million barrels a day for the Saudis, and suddenly it gets very interesting on the upside for the price of oil."
That brings us to Petrobras, Brazil's largest oil company and the stock Heebner thinks is the best way to play oil right now. With petroleum prices so high, a big risk for oil companies is that host countries will demand a bigger and bigger share of the profits in the form of taxes or royalties. "One way you can avoid this," says Heebner, "is if the government owns half the company you've invested in. That's Petrobras."
What we like about Petrobras is that it's cheap enough that it can be a winning investment even if Heebner is proven wrong about $100 oil: The stock trades at eight times 2008 earnings (which are expected to rise 32%). And to top it all off, the company just announced a huge find offshore from Rio de Janeiro, a field with up to eight billion barrels of recoverable oil.
No mesmo número, a revista faz uma rápida análise do mercado brasileiro e a continuação do boom (HARVESTING THE TOP FOREIGN STOCKS, Yuval Rosenberg, 24/12/2007)
Para a revista, a redução na taxa de juros e a manutenção da inflação deverá manter o crescimento do mercado:
"In fact, says Arjun Divecha, manager of the GMO Emerging Markets III fund, there are plenty of reasons the bull market should continue into 2008 and beyond. For one thing, the country's high interest rates are likely to drop. While inflation has been running at around 4%, benchmark interest rates stand at 11.25%. "Those rates are going to come down," Divecha says. "It's almost inevitable." That should help Brazilian stocks in a couple of ways. Lower rates would stimulate spending and consumption, further fueling the country's $1.7 trillion economy. At the same time, lower rates would mean that investors who can currently find attractive returns elsewhere would increasingly put their money into stocks."
