What Will Oil & Gas Companies Buy for You?

Despite all the bad news about the financial world, most of us planning to live beyond working age or planning to put children through college are, overall, still believers in investing money for the future. What does that have to do with natural gas? A lot potentially.
Energy Tomorrow, an information resource of the American Petroleum Institute (API) has a feature on its Wes site called "Do you own an oil company?" There's a pie chart breakout showing in simple terms, who owns stock in Big Oil. According to the site, 43% is owned by mutual funds, another 27% by other institutional investments, and about 14% by IRA's and personal investment accounts. Together somewhere around 84- 85% of oil and gas stock rests in our personal investment portfolios.
Industry information right? Maybe. But given the amount of regulation that goes into reporting such information, I'd guess its probably pretty close to accurrate, if not dead on.
About 53 million or so Americans (about 50% of us) have investments in mutual funds, mostly through company 401k's and what not. Most aren't vigorous investors who watch the market with a close eye. They're too busy. Thats what fund managers are for - in the most simple terms, they invest the money for us in the manner they think will result in the biggest return, which is what everyone involved wants, for the most part.
When those mutual fund and retirement account prospecti and summaries that usually hit the trash or go unlooked at in the growing pile of paper on my desk arrived this quarter, I thought I'd actually take a look. Turns out, every one of the funds I have investments with (including those from my acdemic days) included some kind of investment in energy stocks. Almost all were oil and gas companies. In fact, I was somewhat happy to see that I had my own little piece of XTO when Exxon decided to buy it. Thats not going to put my girls through college, but it certainly helped keep that fund on an even keel in this time of financial upheaval.
I'm not an economist, so I can't really say what that all means on a larger scale, but its an interesting little exercise. If you have personal or institutional investments that deliver those little books to your mailbox, take a look and see what you own. It might surprise you.
Knowing what I know about the Marcellus Shale, and other shale plays around the country, I was happy to see that my fund managers are investing wisely.