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“Generally, broadly speaking, energy is an unloved sector,” said Jennifer Rowland, a St. Louis-based oil and gas analyst for Edward Jones, who covers both U.S. and Canadian oil producers. “It just seems like the industry can’t win.”

The S&P/TSX Capped Energy Index is down 5.18 per cent year-to-date, even as the Standard & Poor’s U.S. Energy Index is up 5 per cent during the same period. U.S. crude is up 22 per cent for the year.

It just seems like the industry can’t win Jennifer Rowland, analyst, Edward Jones

For oilsands producers, Rowland said, costs have come down dramatically but they also started at the higher end of the cost curve and “it’s not like they’re taking costs out and everybody else is standing still.”

In 2014, she said, generalist and institutional investors wanted to own oil and gas stocks for their growth. Fund managers who want that type of growth in their portfolio have shifted their money into the tech sector.

Now, they want to see oil and gas companies demonstrate that they can be value-oriented stocks rather than growth, and more energy companies need to demonstrate their cost-discipline in order to be rewarded as value holdings.

Oilsands companies are also making increasingly bold moves to try and demonstrate this to investors — in some cases, acting completely opposite to actions taken in the lead up to 2014, when the oilsands were the world’s hottest energy play.

At MEG Energy Corp., for instance, president and CEO Derek Evans announced the company was not going to renew one of its leases on a future growth project and would instead “let those lands disappear” rather than pay the increasing annual rent on the land.

Still, generalist and institutional investors are staying on the sidelines, Rowland said.

Looking at Suncor Energy Inc.’s ability to generate $3.4 billion in cash from operating activities last quarter, she said, “These are the kind of stocks that investors should want to own.”

However, given the buyers’ strike, she said it was “just not fun right now” to be in the oil business or to be an analyst covering it.

“General investors are saying, ‘To heck with energy,’” she said.

• Email: gmorgan@nationalpost.com | Twitter: geoffreymorgan