Energy Flags: Q2 Earnings Seen As Worst Of All Sectors As Record-Low Crude Prices Weighed You can say this for the energy sector: It’s hard to imagine things getting much worse than they did in Q2. We’re talking about a quarter where the price of U.S. crude oil averaged $28 a barrel, the lowest for any three-month period in nearly two decades. In one strange confluence of events, crude oil even traded negative for a brief period. This is something never seen before. Crude rebounded to back near $40 a barrel by the end of Q2 and remains right around there as of mid-July, still not enough to rescue the sector from what are likely to be horrific earnings results. As of last week, research firm FactSet pegged the average Q2 earnings per share loss for SP 500 Energy firms at 149.9% vs. a year ago. Keep in mind that Energy wasn’t exactly tearing up the pea patch even in 2019, before COVID-19 came along. So we’re talking about a sector that, for lack of better words, can be called bruised and battered. That goes across all sub-sectors of Energy, though losses are projected to be worse for some parts than others.