Key and Heckmann, meanwhile, support that growth. The former is an incredibly aggressive oil-service company, and the latter works with oil-and-gas companies that frack for natural gas, although it has tried to shift aggressively toward crude.
I can't think of better businesses to be in when crude is going higher, and I can't think of worse businesses to be in when it's heading lower.
That's why these are speculations. They are sink-or-swim, go-or-stop, homerun or strike-out, just like biotech companies with one product that might pan out or might not.
Right now these are among the biggest losers in the market, thanks to the collapse of crude. As long as you'd recognized that risk going in -- as long as you'd realized these weren't
Chevron (CVX) or
ConocoPhillips (COP) or
Exxon Mobil (XOM) -- I think that you would have been a little more accepting of the losses.
If this was all you'd owned, you are upset, but not justifiably so. If this is the case, in fact, I wonder whether you just didn't buy them because they were single-digit stocks of which you could buy a lot more shares than, say,
Apple (AAPL).
Even wise speculation can produce horrific losses, but as long as they are contained to a piece of your portfolio, you should be able to handle these declines. Plus, it ain't over until it is over. I like
Devon (DVN). It's been atrocious and horrible, but it will come out just fine when oil bottoms.
These four will do better than fine.
Right now I think all of these are near the threshold at which everyone will give up on them. Yet, unless the world is headed toward a serious depression -- which I don't think is the case -- I think it is unrealistic to presume that oil can keep going down at this pace.
It's a terrible thing to lose money, but with speculation it comes with the territory. Sometimes the territory is miserable. This, unfortunately, is one of one of those times.
At the time of publication, Action Alerts PLUS, which Cramer co-manages as a charitable trust, was long CVX, DVN and AAPL.
