How Will Energy Stocks Respond to This Earnings Season?

By the time you read this, it is likely that the two largest American oil companies, Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Chevron (CVX), will have reported their calendar Q1 results, due out on Friday morning. We cannot know at this point exactly what they will say, but based on analysts’ estimates we can be pretty sure that both will report EPS that is significantly less than they showed in the same quarter last year. That is a dynamic that is expected to apply to most of the energy sector, and yet, as this chart for the SPDR Energy sector ETF (XLE) shows,…