So the most recent flux came from the following in the last week to 10 days:
1) Key players like Warren Buffet sold off large chunks of tech stocks. Many monitor their actions to get a glimpse into where and what they should be doing/looking for. This therefore causes others to sell off similar options as well. This is why you saw tech take a 6% to almost 20% hit depending on the company.
2) Japan has been trying to slowly increase their interest rate as they have been running at 0% or negative percentage points for something like 17 years now in order to try to prop up and stabalize the Yen against other key currencies like the USD to stay competitive in global markets. Over the weekend, the government raised the interest rate quietly 0.15%, but because of how everything is inflated due to the 0 or less percent previous rate, their companies and markets immediately had some of their "inflated" i.e. useless/fictious capital disappear. This caused people who were invested into those business and markets over in Japan to sell off for fear of a recession in the Japan market and or currency trade hit against the USD. This is why their whole market tanked about 12%. The USA has similar issues, but the Fed/Gov't that created this problem saw it coming and started dialing up the rate to slow inflation as best as they could without, hopefully, causing a jarring crash of the stock like Japan experienced.
3) Friday the US Economic Jobs report came back with much poorer results and immediate futures predictions that was expected.
4) People reacted to number 2 and 3 and, in an already tight/slow environment due to an election year with the election just around the corner and the uncertainty that will bring, went further conservative by selling off and transitioning into more stable options to ride any potential chaos forth coming. This leaves the publically traded companies potentially shorted with margin calls if sell offs are large enough. Because tech stocks were already in a negative trend, they became the easy target to take further damage.
All this to say, not sure how it would impact O&G. I think your biggest predictor is the election cycle. Many O&G who haven't diversified into other areas of energy production and innovation may hold their wallets close to the vest until Dec. when we find out what the next few years policy wise will dictate. Not much different from recent big election years really, just this time around the economy is in a down, weird spot for multiple reasons.
