Driving past a gas (petrol) station, most of us glance at the price of a gallon (liter) of unleaded and render a judgment: Oh, the price of gasoline is rising! Or falling! Or stable!  We create a little mental index that plots the trajectory of gas prices, which influences when to buy gas and, perhaps, how much to buy.
 
Indices surround us: The Consumer Price Index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the FTSE 250 Index. Each index tells us a little bit about the health of the sector it is tracking and the direction of that health.

With that in mind, Spears is introducing the first of several indices for the oilfield service and equipment sector: The Spears Frac Market Index


Spears Frac Market Index

The index looks at all the frac revenues of all the public frac service companies in the world, indexing these cumulative quarterly revenues to Q1 2013. Eighteen companies are currently included in this index: HAL, SLB, BHI, WFT, BAS, FRAC, Trican, Anton, CJES, PUMP. Over time we’ll rebalance within this index, but our work over the last two years has created a very robust technique.

Why Q1 2013? Q1 2013 is a good place to start: a strong, stable market for the frac industry with logical pricing and spare capacity.
 
As the Spears Frac Market Index shows, the frac market boomed in 2014, collapsed in 2015, sagged again in 2016, but was already showing signs of recovery before the start of 2017. Since growth was restored in late 2016, the index has grown 10-20% per quarter, and is entering Q1 2018 at a 10% per quarter growth pace.

Over the next several weeks, Spears will introduce additional indices for other bellwether oilfield equipment and service submarkets. As always, stay tuned for leading insights. And plan your business off of real data trends.