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Shares of Nabors Industries (NBR, news, msgs) are up more than 40% in 2008 and trading near a two-year high because of soaring oil and gas prices.
Investors expect the high prices to lift land-based drillers such as Nabors. The company struggled in the second half of 2007 with reduced rig activity in North America, weaker natural-gas prices and persistently high operating costs.
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Nabors owns and operates 670 land drilling rigs, as well as a smaller offshore fleet that operates in U.S. and international waters. Its tax headquarters are in Bermuda, but the company is run out of Houston.
Nabors appears on a daily list created with MSN Money's StockScouter stock-picking tool that identifies 10 stocks with strong growth prospects in the near term. All stocks with Scouter ratings of 8, 9 or 10 are considered for the list, which is then shortened to exclude all stocks with a trading volume below 50,000 shares a day. The remaining stocks are ranked on the basis of market capitalization, sector membership and whether they are growth or value stocks.
The stock is also benefiting from investor excitement about a possible boom in natural-gas drilling in North America, particularly in Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Alaska.
ConocoPhillips (COP, news, msgs) and BP (BP, news, msgs) said last month that they were joining forces to pursue construction of a long-awaited natural-gas pipeline that would bring the rich energy deposits of northern Alaska to the lower 48 states.
Though it would take a decade to build a project to bring Prudhoe Bay's vast natural-gas reserves to market, the perception that there may be a natural-gas pipeline by 2018 could send exploration into overdrive in the North Slope, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Nabors is the biggest drilling company operating on the North Slope of Alaska's Brooks Range.
| Company | Sector | Tuesday's close | Scouter score |
|---|---|---|---|
Oil-field services | $46.72 | 10 | |
Oil and gas | $90.07 | 10 | |
Oil and gas | $96.87 | 9 | |
Oil and gas pipelines | $37.26 | 9 | |
Natural gas | $56.92 | 9 | |
Oil and gas | $88.74 | 9 | |
Oil-field services | $69.05 | 8 | |
Oil and gas | $130.45 | 8 | |
Oil and gas drilling | $39.15 | 8 | |
Oil and gas | $89.17 | 8 |
StockScouter beats the market
At MSN Money, we think our StockScouter rating system is about as good as it gets when you're trying to decide where to invest. Scouter rates stocks on a scale of 1 to 10. Since it was launched on Aug. 1, 2001, a portfolio of Scouter's top 50 picks has generated a total return that has clobbered the return of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index ($INX) in the same period.StockScouter looks for stocks whose business fundamentals, price behavior, valuation and stock-ownership characteristics appear to predict a rising price in the future, based on how those factors have influenced stock prices in the past. The system assigns each stock an expected six-month return and balances that return against the stock's expected volatility.
Consider this list a starting point for your stock research. Find more information about the stocks using tools such as our Research Wizard. Or set up a watch list of stocks to see how they do over time.
To read more about the StockScouter system, click here. For more detail on this list, click here. To see a full list of Scouter's top-rated stocks, click here.
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