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Chapter 1: What are the current trends in the oil markets?
Oil continues to climb, but is there any relief in sight? Motley Fool Money starts now.
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From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Travis Hoyum, joined today by Lou Whiteman and Dan Kaplinger. And guys, we're going to get to space. Space is going to be a big topic here today, but we do want to start with the oil markets. This is kind of the thing that everybody in the market is thinking about, if not talking about.
And Dan, I wanted to get your thoughts on what's going on, because oil is not... your typical market. It's a physical product. It's traded years out in the futures contracts. We have this Strait of Hormuz that is more or less closed. 20% of the oil in the world goes through that Strait. What are we seeing in oil markets? Because it seems like prices are up.
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Chapter 2: How is SpaceX planning for a $2 trillion IPO?
We're at about $110 per barrel for both West Texas Intermediate and also Brent Crude right now. But it seems like people in the oil industry continue to be worried that things are going to get much worse, but they're not yet. So what's the real story here?
It's interesting because there are so many different perspectives to look at this from. From the perspective of the American consumer, things look pretty bad. Gas prices where I live were around $2.80 a gallon in December. They're up about $1 per gallon, up around $3.80. I think that Regardless of what the actual level is, that dollar increase is pretty consistent across the country.
It's interesting because a lot of folks have suggested that the U.S. is insulated from the impact of this because we don't necessarily depend directly on Persian Gulf oil. But when you look at some of the other countries that do depend more on Persian Gulf oil, they have not even seen the percentage price increases we have. Korea was up about 15%. Japan's up in the 15% to 20% area.
We're up closer to 30% to 35%. It's interesting how the macroeconomics are playing out here. The other thing, and this threatens to get a little bit wonky about futures markets and things like that.
No, let's get wonky. This is what I want to explain. You could spend your whole life just studying what the futures markets are.
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Chapter 3: What does the future of the space economy look like?
There was an entire class that I took in grad school doing the formulas of how you price things like oil. It's fascinating. It's a big reason that things are not higher than they currently are.
So, oil futures are in an unusual situation right now, just for those who aren't familiar with this. You can buy oil at a specific price at a specific point in time in the future. And the prices will be different depending on when you want it. If you want it at a high demand time, the price is going to be higher. If you want it at a lower demand time, the price is going to be lower.
Right now, we have this huge disparity. Front month, the current month, if you want oil right now, $110 a barrel. If you are willing to wait until the end of 2026, much lower, $40 a barrel lower, still $70 oil futures a year and a half out, they're only up $10 a barrel. Prices of the front month are up like $50 a barrel.
What this is telling folks, this is a situation that's called backwardation in the futures markets. What this is telling people is that at least the financial folks trading these futures don't think that oil supply is going to be a problem for very long. They think that something's going to happen, supply is going to get restored, and prices are going to go back at least pretty
close to where they were before all of this started, which is a little bit surprising because we've got some folks saying things like, well, the infrastructure is all messed up and it's going to take a long time for everything to get back to normal.
There's a disconnect between what these futures markets are saying and what you're hearing a lot of experts talking about as far as the physical production and movement of oil across the global market. I mean, just to underline that, the oil futures market does a lot of things. It reflects a lot of things. It reflects investor psychology. It affects some form of speculation.
But also, immediate financial hedging is a big mover of markets here. It does not reflect the underlying physical supply or demand for oil at any given time. So, it's a tough thing to do right now, to look at it. I think we need to focus on supply and what is actually in the refineries and not on the price, but that's a lot harder to look at. So, that's why we look at price.
That seems to be the other piece. We talked, I think, last week about crack spreads, which is the difference between the price of the refined products, gasoline, and the price of oil itself.
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Chapter 4: How are rising oil prices impacting the economy?
That seems to be one of the challenges today is, hey, we can provide you gasoline, but we don't necessarily know, depending on where you are in the world, if we're going to have oil to actually refine in the future. And so there is this kind of delay, too. The other thing is, the Strait of Hormuz, it's a couple of days to get to India. It's two weeks to get to the U.S.
So there is this time lag difference, too, Dan, that just seems to be kind of complicated But you're right, the market is typically smarter than any individual person, and the market is telling us that this is not going to be a big deal. Is it something we should just look past in these wonky pieces in the oil market, or just figure themselves out?
I think it's too early to conclude that because you often will see these markets see major disruptions. They'll see major moves in one direction or another. They're very responsive to current events. You'll see $5, $10 barrel moves in a single day based on, okay, there was an attack, there was damage to a major facility, or there was progress in negotiations, there was some sort of deal.
starting to get European countries involved with that. Oil is fungible. It doesn't matter. Iran could say, we're never going to send oil to the U.S. again. But if it just continues to provide, if it opens markets back up, if it starts selling oil to European countries, to Asia Pacific countries back at their normal regular volumes, then the global markets are fine.
It's just a matter of allocating what's in the global market between the U.S. and other providers. To me, it's too early to conclude that the futures market is right and all of the technical experts are wrong. Like Lou said, there's some financial wrangling going on with the futures markets.
It doesn't always reflect what's actually happening in the physical world, what's happening at the individual oil well level, at the pipeline level, at the tanker level. You have to look at all of that.
Lou, the other piece that I'm ultimately more concerned about than specifically what's going to happen with oil is what happens to the economy. And one of the data points that we got before we started recording is that the jobs market is actually doing pretty well. Jobs were up. Unemployment was down slightly. I think everything was better than expected in that report, by and large.
So it doesn't seem like this...
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Chapter 5: What stocks are included in our mini-portfolio?
incremental step up in prices. We're only a month or so into this, so maybe we wouldn't see some of that data yet. But is an economic impact something that we should at least be thinking about as investors? Because the market is at or near correction territory with the NASDAQ.
The market's starting to pull back a little bit if oil stays elevated and this backwardation that Dan is talking about doesn't stick and we start to go to $140, $150 a barrel. It seems like that would impact the economy, but that's not actually what we're seeing.
Let's take a step back because I think it helps answer this question. We talk about a lot that the U.S. is a net exporter. Dan's talking about how insulated we are. We are a net exporter, but that can be deceiving because that is refined products, too. We export a lot of petroleum. We still import crude. So we are actually still very dependent on the world for crude.
We're not energy independent. Fortunately, less than 10% of that comes through the Gulf. So again, the Saudi oil doesn't really mean, what's going on in Australia, our news isn't too important for us. That's a global story. But we still do need this idea that, well, since we have energy, we can just stop exports and shut it down and let the rest of the world have a problem.
That really doesn't work. work. Where does this leave us with the economy? Should we be watching it? Yes, absolutely. Does it lead to a recession? I hate to answer this way, but the answer is maybe. It's definitely a headwind. We definitely have headwinds already. Seems like the U.S. consumer is doing okay in aggregate. We've talked about that. The consumer, that's a tough thing to read.
Jobs number is strong. If I had to guess, I do think there's enough headwinds that we will end up in at least a mild recession in 2026. As all of this ripples in, as remember, we still have the tariffs rippling in. There's just so much going on. I don't know if I'm worried about a terrible recession. It's not a given. It's never a given.
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Chapter 6: What investment opportunities are currently on our radar?
Yeah, I'm worried, if nothing else. It's funny, though, because we've been saying this for so long. There have been so many of these factors that have been like, oh, well, the consumer's got to give up now. Consumer sentiment is terrible right now. Nobody's certain about what's going on, and yet the economy just keeps plugging along.
I agree with you 100%, Lou, but I have agreed in the past with that sentiment, and that sentiment has just been 100% wrong in the past, in the recent past.
Yeah. This is why I think, as Foolish investors, we talk about the long-term, what sort of investments are going to do well over the next 5, 10, 20 years, because it's so hard to predict what's going to happen over the next six months, particularly with the economy. The other thing to throw into this is, the dollar is getting stronger.
I don't know how that will complicate things from an economic perspective. Lots to think about as this conflict continues and oil prices are going to be something we're probably going to be talking about for quite a while here on the show. When we come back, we're going to talk about the space economy, the potential $2 trillion IPO. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.
Morjens. Hei. Mun autosta kuuluu sellanen tik-tik-tik-tik-tik kun sitä käynnistää. Tik-tik-tik-tik-tik. Tik-tik-tik-tik-tik. Niin. Tik-tik-tik-tik-tik. Että mikähän sitä vaivaa? The solution is easy, yes. It would be a new battery. Fly me to the moon. Let me play among the stars.
Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Space is hot and so is SpaceX. They have apparently officially filed for a confidential public listing. It doesn't really sound like it's that confidential if everybody knows that it happens. But they're looking at potentially, Lou, a $2 trillion valuation. That's a huge number. Can you help me make sense of this?
Well, see, I can't because the part that's confidential is all of the numbers, which is what we'd like to talk about. But look, let's talk about what's going on here because there's a lot of market dynamics going on here. Nothing illegal, nothing unfounded, but this is just how it works. SpaceX, as we all know, has a huge number of shares outstanding. All of its investors, employees, all of that.
But they don't sell all of those shares in an IPO. They don't need to come up with $2 trillion. And I think that's so important, because we're talking about, oh, can the market support a $2 trillion IPO?
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Chapter 7: How does the market perceive the potential of SpaceX?
They only need to come up with $80 billion or whatever they end up pricing, just that small sliver they're going to sell. Given how hot space is, and given investor interest in Elon Musk, I don't think it's a surprise that they can raise $80 or $100 billion. And that's a lot more reasonable sounding than the $2 trillion number. There's a lot of other levers here.
I know Dan loves to talk about the index, so we can get into that. But look, this is a very, very big company with a very large share count. All they need to do is sell this small amount and gosh, there's interest. So yeah, $2 trillion, $3 trillion, who knows what they can get to if they squeeze enough.
Eventually, that matters, though, doesn't it? Because eventually, the lockup period, you talked about all the investors. Those investors, this is what you would call an exit. That means that they get to take their money out.
Even if there's a three-month or a six-month lockup period, you would think that eventually, the number of shares being sold in the public market, the float, is going to increase pretty dramatically.
Absolutely. The better question is, can they sustain that valuation? Not the valuation they can get on the first day. Look, I feel like we're re-debating Tesla. As people have been saying for years, we can't sustain that. I think I'd probably take the underlying on whether or not it's still over $2 trillion, if it goes out of $2 trillion in six months.
But I don't think it's going to fall dramatically. I think there is a lot of excitement, a lot of interest here. There is definitely market support for this IPO. It's big numbers, it matters and stuff, but we're almost talking semantics, whether or not, on what level can it support. There is interest here, and that's what you need to do an IPO.
Travis, I want to point out one thing about the exit that you talked about. It's true that the most obvious exit is just selling the shares outright. But recently, we've had more and more high-level employees with big stock holdings, they never sell shares.
Instead, they'll go to a broker, they'll make an arrangement, they will pledge shares as collateral, they will have a loan facility that lets them draw money out of it. The shares never get sold. It is, at that point, in everyone's best interest, the shareholder, the bank, the lending bank, to keep the share price as high as possible, and so those shares never actually trade hands.
Elon Musk has done that to great success over the course of his career. I suspect that his best employees have seen that and are willing to emulate it. I will be curious to what extent the investors that have gotten in on SpaceX pre-IPO decide to fully exit versus using one of these alternative strategies.
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Chapter 8: What factors should investors consider in the current market?
We'll, I'm sure, cover those on the show when they come out. But what is interesting about the space economy Because that's really what we're buying and I'm still a little bit confused of exactly what that's going to look like five or 10 years from now.
Travis, space is the final frontier. There are estimates all over the place here. The most famous one is Morgan Stanley saying $1 trillion in space revenue by 2040. That's like the North Star. SpaceX, we don't know exactly, but it's maybe $16 billion today. They're not going to have half of that trillion even if it comes, but there is at least a there there for growth. How's it going to grow?
In theory, there are a lot of things you can do in space. I'm going to take the under on the databases in space, at least for the foreseeable future. A lot of the exotic things, but there are a lot of ways that companies can benefit from the data you can get from space, the incremental positives. The government, militaries are increasingly interested there.
There's a lot of revenue potential there. Just like every other market excitement, there are winners and losers here. Not everyone is going to make it. Valuations are all over the place, but they're mostly high. It's the Wild West, it's early days, just like all of these markets go. But there is a real path towards revenue growth on both the global government and commercial side.
That is what SpaceX, as a leader here, and give them credit, they are a leader here, That's what they're leaning into with the IPO.
Dan, the other piece of this is you have a social media and AI business attached to SpaceX. That seems like the new version of a conglomerate.
Yeah, and kind of the negative version of the conglomerate. I mean, space stocks are hot, but boy, social media is kind of taking it on the chin lately. And so putting Twitter in with SpaceX seems like the negative side of putting things together in a conglomerate.
At the same time, you also have XAI, which I think that there's probably some investors who would have preferred that the AI side be a pure play and be divorced from the space stuff because they share loose confusion about, well, what is the space economy? What is SpaceX really focused on?
If you mix those two in, it's like, well, AI is not just a space data center play, AI is much more than that. The combination here, I'm not sure what Musk gets out of it. It seems to complicate things, but like Lou said, we have to wait for the paperwork before we actually know what this thing is going to look like for investors.
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