Expect More Selling in Oil Stocks

Oil. It gets worse. No one has expanded as fast as ConocoPhillips (COP - commentary - Cramer's Take). The company's been a paradigm of aggressiveness. Thursday's announcement of thinner margins will cause other companies that're thinking about making acquisitions to wonder if the strategy will work or make them look foolish.

I think they will take up the latter.

Just as recently as a year ago, there were so many ways to win in the patch that it was dartboard time.

Now it's one of those games where you keep hitting the wall instead of the dartboard -- that is, when you aren't hitting other players.

I keep thinking that as bad as it is at Conoco, what the heck is it like at Anadarko (APC - commentary - Cramer's Take)? Could that company simply have become roadkill?

And today's downgrade of Exxon (XOM - commentary - Cramer's Take), the company that did nothing during the run-up and only started to rally after the downturn, says there is no hiding for even those companies that played it safe and bought back stock, which had become the plan for Conoco at the end of the year.

I have to believe that much of the downturn comes from having no place to put crude. Every inch of tank space has been taken up. (Why doesn't the Strategic Petroleum Reserve get in there and lock up some crude?)

But there is also a sense, my intelligence guys tell me, that the totally untalked-about Ethiopian victory means there could be a moment upon us in which oil's "terror premium" can subside. I hate to be as pessimistic as the nihilists out there, but with the exception of a day's worth of victory in Iraq and the couple of days' hold on Afghanistan that the West had, the "good guys" have been completely and utterly on the run and the terrorists have had their way. I know, bizarre view, but the terror premium was always between $2 and $7 in my opinion and right now we seem to be leaning toward the low end of that range.

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