The following chart is a brief list of the top-10 sized oil and gas companies in Canada, and their year-to-date performance ended September 1, 2010, not including the impact of dividends (which would be significant in the cases of COS and PWT which distribute most of their income through their trust structure):
| Name | Ticker | %-YTD |
| Suncor Energy Inc. | SU | -9.35% |
| Canadian Natural Resources Limited | CNQ | -7.63% |
| Imperial Oil Limited | IMO | -2.73% |
| Husky Energy Inc. | HSE | -16.42% |
| EnCana Corporation | ECA | -13.19% |
| Cenovus Energy Inc | CVE | 11.66% |
| Talisman Energy Inc. | TLM | -13.00% |
| Canadian Oil Sands Trust | COS | -14.04% |
| Nexen Inc. | NXY | -19.27% |
| Penn West Energy Trust | PWT | 6.09% |
Cenovus is clearly the winner here – investors are quite happy with parking capital into non-conventional Canadian oil. It is surprising that Suncor has not fared better, probably due to integration concerns with Petro Canada. Husky Energy and Nexen have been the worst performers. Husky has had a significant management change and appears to be in petrochemical limbo with no obvious growth. Nexen has Gulf of Mexico exposure and this can explain its performance.
It should be important to distinguish the difference between oil and gas – gas commodities have been priced significantly less than oil over the past couple of years, so EnCana and other gas-concentrated producers should lag the oil companies at present.
Finally, there are likely many more analysts out there that follow these ten companies that are much more knowledgeable about the individual companies and their exploration properties, so it is unlikely that by mining the relative price data that there can be any value extracted from this very simple analysis. It does tell you which companies have had lowered and raised expectations since the beginning of the year, however.