Cimarex Energy Co. (...

CNN Money is running an interesting feature by David Goldman entitled "10 countries, 10 solutions" which details the particularities of the global economic crisis facing 10 key countries. In typical old-media fashion, the layout makes no sense from a user-friendliness perspective, so I'm going to take significant liberties in reposting their original content. They also have a single table layout of the 10 countries here. Time Warner lawyers, if you're watching this, get your editorial guys to put their content into a more sensible format that doesn't require constant clicking and I won't have to go such lengths to discuss it and in turn will actually drive more traffic to your site. Got that? Good. Now then, first some

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El Paso Corporation (EP) has surprised on the Zacks Consensus Estimate 3 out of the last 4 quarters by an average of 24.49% even as the prices of natural gas and oil have plunged. The company is cheap, trading at just 9.3x forward earnings.

Company Description

El Paso Corporation is a large independent natural gas producer and operates one of North America's largest interstate natural gas pipeline systems.

El Paso Surprised by 19.05% on the Second Quarter

On Aug 6, El Paso reported its second quarter results and beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 4 cents. Earnings per share were 25 cents which was lower than the 39 cents from a year ago. Lower natural gas and oil prices impacted the results.

The company saw production rise in the Central and Western divisions by 6% and 5%, respectively, over the year ago period.

With the drop in crude

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Above is a graph of various commodity ETFs. The main ticker is UNG (United States Natural Gas Fund), a ETF which tracks prices of natural gas delivered at Henry Hub. OIL is the iPath Oil ETN. JJA is the iPath Agricultural Commodities ETN.  JJM is the iPath Industrial Metals ETN. And, JJP is the iPath Precious Metals ETN. The chart displays the year-to-date performance of these various commodity indexes and it’s plainly obvious that one stands out among the others. Generally speaking, non-energy commodities have been on an upward trend since the beginning of the year and in fact would have provided mid-to-high teens returns just in the last few months! Even oil, though down precipitously in the first

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As a stampede of oil and gas exploration and development companies race toward the prize of higher oil and gas prices, the legwork needed to efficiently capitalize is often lost to the lure of a quick strike. Exploration and development of past and future oil and gas prospects takes time, research and money. The temptation of a quick score is huge, but finding an oil and gas company that has done their homework is the key to long-term profit in a fast-paced and changing natural resources market.

SunCal Energy Inc., an oil and gas exploration and development company, works to discover, rework and extract oil and gas deposits in California, Wyoming, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. The company is primarily involved with operations located adjacent to existing or closed development sites once owned and operated by ExxonMobil Chevron and Conoco Phillips, et al.

The company has been having solid results at its

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