Frontier Oil (FTO: sentiment, chart, options) is up nearly 5% after the company surpassed Wall Street's first-quarter earnings expectations. FTO saw net income decline by 38% during the quarter, but profits of $45.97 million, or 44 cents per share, easily surpassed analysts' expectations for 12 cents per share. Revenue gained 13% to $1.19 million.

The quarterly results were pressured by lower refining margins due to record-high crude prices, in addition to a 24% drop in output. However, FTO said it expects an uptick in production output during the second quarter, with projected output of 143,500 barrels per day. (During the first quarter, daily production averaged just 126,018 barrels.)

In today's session, FTO is trading narrowly atop its 10-week moving average. This intermediate-term trendline has pressured the shares lower since December 2007. In fact, the refining firm has lagged the broader S&P 500 Index (SPX) throughout 2008. FTO has a 60-day relative-strength reading of 67% versus the broad-market barometer, which indicates that the stock has underperformed the SPX by 33 percentage points during the past 60 days.