Chesapeake Energy Corporation (CHK) Gets the Thumbs Up from Evercore

Traders are keeping a close eye on Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE:CHK) on Wednesday after Stephen Richardson of Evercore ISI added the oil and gas producer to the firm’s ‘Tactical Outperform List’. Richardson is bullish due to Chesapeake’s ~20% year-to-date pull back and relatively low expectations by many market traders. Furthermore, the analyst thinks that incremental wells from Anadarko and other basins could lead to more production and improve sentiment for the stock. Evercore has a $8 target price.

In addition to the Evercore news, traders will be keeping a close eye on Chesapeake due to Wednesday’s upcoming EIA inventory report. If the EIA report is better than expectations, oil prices could rise and help improve Chesapeake sentiment. As it stands, many oil and gas securities have lagged the rally in crude in recent weeks and bulls hope that dynamic will change in the future.

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).

According to our data of 742 elite funds, the number of funds long Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE:CHK) didn’t change at 41 from the end of Q3 to the end of Q4, but the amount held decreased to $884.01 million from $1.33 billion in the same time frames.

The Bottom Line

Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE:CHK) is trending due to bullish Wall Street commentary. For more reading, check out ‘8 Countries That Produce The Most Crude Oil In the World‘.

Disclosure:None

oil-pump-jacks-1425456_1280