Oil earnings: ConocoPhillips misses, Shell profit skyrockets

Yahoo Finance Live’s Julie Hyman breaks down oil earnings.

Video transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

JULIE HYMAN: Let's take a little oil detour, shall we? We are seeing oil prices pull back today, a little more than 1%, as we've got a stronger dollar. That's one of the things that could be weighing on it. WTI at around $75 bucks a barrel. Brent, just about $81.68. But we are also watching, of course, the energy stocks. And that's because we still have many of these oil majors that are reporting their numbers.

Let's start with ConocoPhillips. Continuing on the trend that we have seen from some of their peers and returning cash to shareholders, in the case of Conoco, an $11 billion buyback is what it is authorizing for 2023. And it's also declaring a dividend of $0.51 a share.

But as you see, the shares are down by almost 5% here. It looks like the company's fourth quarter results are coming in below what analysts had been anticipating. So that has to do-- partly to do with what we are seeing here. For the forecast, the company's CapEx is higher than had been estimated. So maybe there's a little bit of disappointment that they are spending more, perhaps.

And then there is Shell, which we also heard from Royal Dutch Shell. And it becoming the latest oil major to report a record profit for last year. For last year, Shell made $41.6 billion in profit. That means now that we've got Chevron, Exxon, and Shell, a total profit from those three companies of $132 billion. Big record profits from the oil majors. Those shares, though, are trading little changed in today's session.

If we do look at this sort of heat map that we have of earnings overall and how these companies are trading today, looks like a little bit of a mixed picture. Obviously, Meta, the big one in the green here. But we have got Merck and Eli Lilly trading lower. We're going to talk more about those later, as well as Bristol-Myers Squibb. So pharma a little bit weaker in today's session.