Hedge Funds Investing Heavily In Refineries -- Counterintuitive -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

From JunkScience.com:

Hedge funds have invested a record $6.5 billion in U.S. petroleum refiners, expecting profit to jump as companies shut aging plants and acquire cheaper supplies of North American crude from burgeoning shale-oil wells.

Barry Rosenstein’s Jana Partners LLC and David Tepper’s Appaloosa Management LP alone have amassed $1.3 billion of stock, joining funds that together more than quintupled their money in the industry since the S&P 500 Oil & Gas Refining & Marketing Index’s eight-year low in the fourth quarter of 2008. The index soared 18 percent this year, beating the 5 percent gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

This was reported in a Bloomberg article. See the last paragraph:

North Dakota’s Bakken is the center of that boom. Production has more than tripled since 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, because of drilling techniques including hydraulic fracturing.

I remember all the stories back in 2008 about how the Bakken was over-hyped.

If you know how to do it, go to Yahoo!Financial and do a 5-year comparison on return comparing Apple, Inc. (AAPL) and Northern Oil and Gas (NOG). NOG handily beat AAPL, about 550% to 480% return.

Again, see disclaimer at the sidebar at the right. This is not an investment site. I accumulate shares in none of the companies mentioned on this page, and have no intention of doing so in the near term (> 1 year).

I invest, although not so much anymore. I give most of any free cash I have to a) Starbucks; b) my granddaughters; c) my younger daughter (the older daughter has the granddaughters); and, d) the Harvard Book Store.  I do not trade.