The world's energy companies found only 174 new oil and gas fields last year, a 60-year low, compared to an annual average of 400-500 in the years leading up to 2013, say Ed Crooks and Andrew Ward on FT.com.
This is partly due to reduced exploration budgets following the oil price slide, which has cut wildcat, or exploratory drilling (see chart); this can bankrupt small companies if they don't find oil or gas.
But it's also because 190 billion barrels of shale oil and gas have appeared in the past decade. Shale wells can be brought on stream in weeks, compared to five years for deepwater discoveries.
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Viewpoint
"When does the next banking crisis start? When the only banker who properly understood the last one retires. That used to be the rule, allowing for a new apocalypse every 20 years (top bankers often retire early, remember, owing to having too much money). Perhaps they can come around faster if Donald Trump happens to be president Trump [has] signed an executive order to review the 2010 Dodd-Frank regulations, which aimed to separate ordinary savings from casino-like trading Over here, the ground is shifting in Trumpian ways you can pencil the next banking crisis in for around 2020 we can call it the Trump Slump."
Simon English, Evening Standard
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Should you invest in UK equities?The FTSE 100 hit a record high this week, but UK equities remain unloved and undervalued compared to their global and US peers. Should you snap them up at a discount?
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State pension errors: DWP urged to check for mistakes among divorced peopleFormer pensions minister Steve Webb says there are a high number of divorced women on low state pensions. Now MPs want the DWP to check if there were any errors in “potentially underpaying men and women who are divorced”.
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What would the greatest mathematician of the Middle Ages say about gold today?Sponsored Italian mathematician Fibonacci is most famous for a curious sequence of numbers. Continuing his series on technical analysis, Dominic Frisby explains what these numbers are, and what they can tell us about gold’s next move.
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How moving averages can reveal trades worth betting on – and ones to avoidSponsored Dominic Frisby looks in more depth at how moving averages can help you catch turning points in markets and help you decide which trades are worth pursuing.
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This chart pattern could be extraordinarily bullish for goldCharts The mother of all patterns is developing in the gold charts, says Dominic Frisby. And if everything plays out well, gold could hit a price that investors could retire on.
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Believe it or not, this market is a “buy”Charts With the world in the state it’s in and the market so volatile, buying stocks right now might go against all your instincts. But that’s just what you should be doing, says Dominic Frisby. Here, he explains why.
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Chart of the week: avocados and bitcoin are in syncCharts An amusing new spurious correlation has been spotted between the price of bitcoin and Mexican Hass avocados. In reality, of course, they have nothing to do with each other beyond “superficial price action”.
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Chart of the week: Kuwait's stockmarket is ready for take-offCharts Kuwait's stockmarket is due to be promoted from “frontier” status to an emerging market by index provider MSCI next June. That should entice almost $10bn of global investors’ cash into the country.
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Chart of the week: US stocks outrun profitsCharts The US stockmarket has become totally detached from underlying profits of its constituent companies over the past three years.
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Chart of the week: Dr Copper diagnoses an ailing economyCharts The price of copper has slipped by a fifth this year and is now at a near-two-year low of around $5,600 a tonne.
