Rebuilding and cleanup efforts after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will pour tens of billions of dollars into the Gulf Coast over the next few years, and investors wasted no time bidding up the stocks of some obvious recipients of that cash. For example, shares of Shaw Group, a construction-and-engineering firm, soared 46% in the two weeks after Katrina hit. Shares of heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar jumped 10%.

But for most companies, the impact the hurricanes is a mixed bag, at best. Katrina hobbled the country's second-largest shipping port, choked off crucial supplies of gasoline and natural gas, and put an estimated 400,000 people out of work. How will these factors play out in the stock market? Consider five key sectors affected by the storm and some of the opportunities that might arise as the recovery begins.

Energy

Katrina alone knocked out more than half of the Gulf of Mexico's daily oil production and about one-third of its natural-gas output. As a result, crude prices, after initially topping $70 per barrel, still hovered above $60 in mid September (up from $43 a year earlier). Natural-gas prices are above $11 per million British thermal units, an increase of 118% over the past year.

Prices should ease as lost production comes back on line. But demand remains heavy, and analysts are rethinking their pre-Katrina price forecasts. For example, analyst Robert Morris, of Banc of America Securities, set new, higher 18-month price targets on a host of exploration-and-production firms based on $50-a-barrel oil and $7.50-per-million-BTU gas (prices at which he thinks those commodities will stabilize). His favorites are two independent exploration companies: Houston-based Apache (APA), which operates wells in the Gulf of Mexico, Canada, Egypt and elsewhere; and Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy (CHK), the third-largest independent natural-gas producer in the U.S. Apache recently traded at $73 a share, and Chesapeake Energy at $34. Morris's new price targets are $96 for Apache and $43 for Chesapeake.

Insurers

Here the picture is murkier than the floodwaters that covered New Orleans. Estimates of Katrina-related insured losses are as high as $60 billion, but they are just guesswork. Also unclear is the extent of flood-related damage, which is not covered by most insurers' policies. Some front-line property-and-casualty insurers' losses will be covered by reinsurers, which specialize in catastrophic losses. But no one knows yet how big a hit reinsurers will take. Avoid them for now. Property insurers themselves will take a hit, but "the industry is built to deal with issues like Katrina," says Malcolm Polley, chief investment officer at S&T Wealth Management, in Indiana, Pa.

Standard & Poor's is maintaining its top, five-star rating on Allstate, even though the firm has no reinsurance coverage in the affected states. Allstate (ALL) mainly writes homeowners and auto-insurance policies. S&P's one-year target price on Allstate is $75, well above the stock's recent price of $55.

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