Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp (USA) (KOG): Can The Boom Continue?

On Thursday, Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp (USA) (NYSE:KOG) will release its latest quarterly results. The key to making smart investment decisions on stocks reporting earnings is to anticipate how they’ll do before they announce results, leaving you fully prepared to respond quickly to whatever inevitable surprises arise. That way, you’ll be less likely to make an uninformed knee-jerk reaction to news that turns out to be exactly the wrong move.

The Bakken Shale area in western North Dakota has been an instrumental part of the renaissance in U.S. energy production, and Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp (USA) (NYSE:KOG) has been at the epicenter of the frenzied production activity going on in the play. Let’s take an early look at what’s been happening with Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp (USA) (NYSE:KOG) over the past quarter and what we’re likely to see in its quarterly report.

Stats on Kodiak Oil & Gas

Source: Yahoo! Finance.

Will Kodiak Oil & Gas strike it rich this quarter?
In recent months, analysts have largely held their ground on Kodiak’s earnings prospects, holding their first-quarter estimates unchanged but boosting their full-year 2013 consensus by a penny per share. The stock, though, has reflected far less optimism among investors, falling more than 12% since late January.

We’ve already gotten a strong idea of what Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp (USA) (NYSE:KOG)’s first-quarter numbers will look like from its preliminary sales update. The company said that it more than doubled production from last year’s first quarter to 21,700 barrels per day. That leaves Kodiak well behind regional leader Continental Resources, Inc. (NYSE:CLR) and its levels of roughly triple Kodiak’s output, but with 18 net wells completed and expectations for 75 net wells for the year, Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp (USA) (NYSE:KOG) expects another 35%-45% of production growth by the end of the year.