Welcome to the preview issue of Oil & Gas Financial Journal.
This is a small sample of things to come. OGFJ will make its full debut in June.
Published quarterly, OGFJ will be for financial professionals who make decisions within and about oil and gas companies, including individual and institutional investors, bankers, financial officers, and analysts.
Editors of Oil & Gas Journal will produce OGFJ. But the new magazine will differ from its parent, which targets operational decision-makers in the oil and gas business.
OGJ naturally and deliberately gravitates to the hard technical edges of its subjects. Its financial offspring, with its different target audience, will focus more intentionally on money.
The reason
Why are we doing it? Simple answer: Readership surveys show that OGJ already gets heavy attention from financial readers. OGFJ gives us the chance to serve needs specific to those readers already familiar with OGJ but not technically part of the target audience.
Furthermore, boundaries between the operational and financial audiences have blurred. Except at the top managerial tiers of oil and gas companies, there used to be clear divisions between technical and financial professionals. Not anymore—or at least not as much as before.
Now, many financial analysts have engineering or geology degrees. And few practicing engineers and geologists any longer can afford to avoid the financial dimensions of their decisions.
Financial and technical audiences, therefore, increasingly overlap. OGJ and OGFJ thus should complement one another.
Core feature
This preview issue introduces a core feature of OGFJ: a quarterly version of the OGJ200, which appears annually in OGJ.
The OGJ200 is a list of publicly traded oil and gas producers based in the US, ranked by assets, with 14 items of financial and operating data for each company, also ranked.
Data for the annual OGJ200 come from annual reports and Form 10-Ks filed yearly at the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The quarterly OGJ200 in OGFJ will include the financial data companies report quarterly to SEC on Form 10-Q. OGFJ's reporting lag is 2 quarters. This abbreviated issue of OGFJ thus covers results reported for third-quarter 2003. Fourth-quarter 2003 results will appear in the quarterly OGJ200 due for the inaugural issue of OGFJ late in June.
The company universe for the quarterly OGJ200 is the same as that of the preceding annual OGJ200, the most recent of which appeared in the Sept. 15, 2003, issue of OGJ.
The quarterly list will adjust to reflect mergers and other such changes. New companies won't be added to the quarterly lists until they appear on the annual list in OGJ; any newcomers will, however, appear on a side list in OGFJ. Keeping the basic list consistent as possible will help highlight changes that occur over the course of a year.
One trend already is easy to spot. Fewer companies appear on the list in this preview issue, based on filings for the third quarter of 2003, than appeared on the Sept. 15 list in OGJ, which included annual data for 2002.
For that matter, the annual list didn't include a full contingent of 200 companies, although we didn't change the name. SEC annual filings didn't include 200 publicly traded oil and gas producers.
When OGJ began publishing this list in 1983, the name was OGJ400, which omitted a number of companies for being too small. Those were the days.
Shrinkage in the roster of US oil and gas companies thus shows up with special clarity on the OGJ200, which just as usefully highlights other, less evident trends, such as fast growth and leadership in several measures of financial performance. The quarterly OGJ200 in OGFJ will, of course, track movements in those categories.
More to come
OGFJ also will include commentary by specialists about the quarterly OGJ200 and other topics, interviews with interesting people, staff round-ups of the financial implications of important drilling plays, and more.
This preview issue thus kicks off the quarterly OGJ200 and offers a taste of things to come, with articles by members of the OGJ staff and one by the chief operating officer of an OGJ affiliate, Oil & Gas Journal Exchange/Madison Energy Advisors. A media kit follows the articles.
I hope you'll let us know what you think—and return for the full course in June.
