There has been some big news over the last week with prominent accounts on Energy FinTwit surprisingly announcing their retirement.

What is Energy FinTwit?

If you work in Oil and Gas and you’re not aware of Energy Fintwit, chances are you’re over 40-years-old and aren’t the most savvy when it comes to social media, but let me catch you up to speed.

Energy FinTwit stands for “Energy Financial Twitter.” To give you a brief description of EFT, it’s a group of anonymous accounts who come from backgrounds in petroleum engineering, geology, land, investment banking, etc. who highlight the flaws of shale E&P’s, or “shitcos” as the EFT mob calls them.

The content that comes out from this group is generally pessimistic in nature, comical with the memes, and above all else, extremely educating.

Growth of the Community

The EFT community has been growing extremely fast over the last six months or so. To give you context, I spent years on Twitter with only 20 followers, there was no O&G community.

Over the last several months I’ve gone up to ~1,300 followers (connect with me @FracSlap) and Twitter is now my favorite platform to interact with others in O&G. While there are many valuable anonymous accounts, two of the ring leaders, BRV and Phantom, surprised me this week when they said they were retiring from EFT.

What was odd about this is that these guys have been putting out loads of research and content supporting the short of the shale industry and now all of their projections are coming to fruition.

Why would they leave right when they are getting the chance to take their victory lap?

The EFT Whiting Report

Let’s take a step back and look at a notable moment, the EFT Whiting report. (You can find it here)

The Whiting report was like the Mona Lisa of EFT. It was a scorching research paper put together by BRV, Oil Gonif, and O&G OG. It was a very technical analysis of Whiting’s assets and to make a long story short, the conclusion was that Whiting should be worth $0.

In mid-February, Debtwire published an article about Whiting seeking out advisers to help restructure looming debt maturities. This caused Whiting’s stock to crash, at one point losing over 50% of its value in one day.

With a group of people on EFT holding a short position, the place went nuts with excitement and congratulations.

It was prophetic.

A group of anonymous Twitter accounts predicting the downfall of an E&P.

BRV’s Retirement

This was the pinnacle. A group of industry professionals who have fought for investors by exposing misaligned management teams and bullshit investor relations presentations, bringing awareness to so many other people both inside and outside of the industry.

Maybe BRV felt like he couldn’t top this, or maybe it was this tweet where Mark Papa reportedly saw it and chuckled? Just an overall stacked couple of weeks for the man WillRayValentin, he has to be asking himself “What else could I possibly fucking do?”

Phantom’s Retirement

As for Phantom, I don’t know this guy’s thinking. The only thing I know about him is that if I’m on the management team of an E&P, the last person in the world I want tweeting about my company late at night is this guy. Absolute savage.

I’m convinced that he stays on his computer 24/7 running well analytics and posting his findings. He’s not the type of person that does it for notoriety, he gets nothing out of it other than what I assume is the pure satisfaction of burning companies down.

His retirement announcement was sparked by a random account that recently popped up mocking the EFT shorts. The account was a spin-off of the wildly popular VCBrags account. It’s pretty lame and lazy. My guess is that it’s probably someone on an E&P management team, probably a landman with nothing better to do. (Shoutout to my landman homies, much love.)

Annnnd…He’s Back

As I was writing this blog, trying to make sense of the world and why these guys would leave, BRV caught wind of the EFT shorts parody account and expressed his disappointment.

I was pumped to see it, EFT is nothing without the people who made it what it is today. Maybe soon, BRV will leave the bat cave, change his profile pic back to his trademarked 80’s themed movie screenshot, and get back to work for the people.