Investing in the Energy Sector
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On this podcast, we take you inside those conversations, the stories, the ideas and the stocks to watch so you can invest smarter. Now, let's dial in. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Barron's Live, our weekly webcast and podcast. I'm Ben Levison, deputy editor of Barron's. Thanks for joining us today to learn more about what's happening with the stock market, which continues to get rattled by concerns around tariffs and possible stagflation and the energy sector, which has rallied despite these worries.

Lauren's out sick today, so you're stuck with me. My guest today is Barron's senior writer and energy maven, Avi Salzman, who will walk us through the market chaos and look ahead at what's ahead for oil, gas, renewables, and of course, energy stocks. Avi, welcome to Barron's Life. Thanks, Ben. Happy to be here.

So I know we advertise this as a discussion about energy stocks and the energy market, but you also write the trader column for us every four weeks. So let's start off with the stock market, which at least last time I looked was having another tough day as long as we ignore the Dow, which was up ever so slightly. I think the S&P 500 has dropped for seven out of nine weeks and the MAG 7, it was once the trade that only trade that matters. Maybe it is now too, but it's mattering on the downside. So what's going on?

I think most of what investors are worried about today are the tariffs. You know, we've got what Donald Trump calls Liberation Day on Wednesday, where we could see tariffs on a very wide range of goods on a very wide range of countries. I think people are bracing for what that could mean for prices. I think there's rising concerns about

the economy and possibly even a word we haven't heard in 40 plus years, stagflation. Yeah, I mean, stagflation is, I mean, I have vague memories of being a little kid in the 70s. And I know my parents' first mortgage was close to 20%, but it's not something I really want to think about if I don't have to. But so the stock market now feels very oversold on these fears, but it's felt that way for weeks. What do you think can reverse that weakness?

Yeah, I agree with you. It does seem like to some degree oversold, but we are going to have to see what happens with tariffs, which really could continue to slam businesses. So if tariffs come in much more benign than expected, we could see a relief rally. And if payrolls on Friday...

which are obviously a big economic indicator, show up better than expected. You could see some optimism, but it does seem like the mix of policy and economics now still don't look very good for the market, and this could really weigh on things for a while.

Yeah, I mean, I know I'm still looking to see whether this is a kind of, you know, sell the rumor, buy the news kind of event heading into Wednesday. But I have no confidence that it will be. But I have no confidence in myself in this market right now anyway.

One of the things that stands out to me is that the energy sector is the stock market's best this year. It was up almost 9% at the end of last week, even though oil prices have dropped in 2025. So why are oil prices stuck around $70, give or take? And where do you think they're headed next?

I think there are a lot of moving parts in oil. I think there are definite concerns moving prices downward, including just oversupply. Chinese oil demand has been pretty stagnant for a year or so now. And there's some people talking about the idea that Chinese oil demand has basically peaked. It's the most important global importer, number one global importer of oil. So if that's the case, then

you know that's that's a real uh problem for the oil market i think uh you know a lot of companies around the world have increased oil production over the past couple of years and opec is about to

add even more barrels, reversing some of its supply cuts. So we just have pretty good chances of an oversupply in the second half of the year. At the same time, we've got all sorts of geopolitical dynamics going on that could be bullish for oil prices. I think the biggest one there is Iran, which is now in sort of a war of words with President Trump.

over the nuclear program the nuclear deal that he wants that could lead to conflict in a variety of ways i think didn't uh trump over the weekend say something about uh bombing around uh if they don't uh you know go ahead and make some some sort of deal yeah any escalation would almost certainly cause a pretty severe spike in oil prices they're up a bit today but if uh if we actually see um

you know, weapons fly in one direction or another, we could see much more serious changes in the oil market. So I think investors are generally bearish, but it's pretty hard to be bearish, you know, really make a strong bearish bet at a time when there could, in fact, be a real conflict coming up there.

And what about Russia? Would it coming back, being welcomed back into the international community by President Trump, bring more oil onto the market? Or is that oil already being sort of accounted for by going to China, India, whatever? Yeah, that would change the dynamic a little bit. But you're right, that oil has continued to flow in the market, either through shadow tankers or through traditional tankers at this point.

under sanctioned vessels. So that would change things to some degree, but I think a lot of that's already baked in. Donald Trump also would like to get back to kind of a drill, baby drill kind of environment. How would that affect the oil market and how are drillers in the United States feeling about it?

You know, I think as a concept, it can be, you know, a positive for for oil drillers. But in reality, I think for the most part, they've been very frustrated with the president.

You know, that came through last week in a survey released by the Dallas Federal Reserve, which which polls oil companies once every three months. And this latest one was extremely negative towards the president's actions, particularly tariffs. But, you know, there was one

oil executives said the administration's chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets, which is quite a strong statement at a time when publicly most oil companies have been pretty positive about the president or at least made some statements in that effect. So that's an issue for the shale markets. Drill, baby, drill sounds good.

In practice, though, if everyone did drill, we could see oil prices plummeting much faster. And once things got to about 50 bucks, that would probably lead to the end of supply growth and people having to pull rigs out of the shale fields.

How big a problem is $70 oil? It actually doesn't seem like the worst place to be. Would oil companies be happy if it stayed in this area? Yeah, this is a pretty good range here.

for the most part, has lowered their breakeven prices. It doesn't make it extremely exciting to drill a new well. Most companies have breakeven prices for a new well of about $65. So you're not making an enormous margin there, but it still makes some sort of economic sense to keep drilling. But

Almost all these companies make pretty good money and can cover their dividends at 70 bucks. So it's not something they'd be too worried over. But I think there's a growing anxiety that 70 bucks is not the end state this year for oil. I think for the most part, there's just the bearish forces are much stronger right now than the bullish ones.

So let's turn to the energy stocks then, because that backdrop, if I'm thinking about where oil is going next, that doesn't sound good for oil companies. And yet the energy sector is the market's best performer this year. What explains that disconnect? Yeah, that's been kind of fascinating to watch. A lot of these stocks are

The big ones that everyone relies on like Exxon and Chevron, analysts have actually been taking down their earnings estimates, which normally is a terrible sign for these companies. But investors keep buying them, basically paying more for less future earnings growth. Valuations are going up to 15, 16 times for the big US oil majors.

which historically is not extremely expensive, but definitely for the past five years is around the top of where they've traded. I think there's a sense in general that oil is going to be around a little bit longer maybe than people thought a year or so ago. I think oil has also been a pretty good uncorrelated supply

sector to tech. And I think tech has been pretty much the biggest loser of the sell-off this year. So I think people are looking to, it's not quite a flight to safety, but it's a flight to an asset that's uncorrelated, that also has kind of an advantage of being geopolitically, you can play off of geopolitical anxiety by getting into oil because you're

generally when things get more dangerous in the world, the expectation is that oil will rise. Whereas a lot of other sectors, that's definitely not the case. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that struck me is oil companies, you talk to people and they almost feel like they didn't need to own them for a very long period of time. Because they're so small as a part of the index,

And, you know, they were having to go up for a long time that you didn't really need to pay attention. Do you think that's changed? I mean, are people, do you think, rushing back into some of these stocks that they'd ignored for a long time?

I would say that it's not quite rushing back in, but I do think that they're getting another look. These companies all have strong and defensible dividends. You know, it can be enticing to people to see companies like Chevron with a 4% plus dividend yield, BP, which has been a somewhat troubled stock, but a 5% plus yield,

that for the most part are not considered in any danger of cutting those yields, those dividends. So, you know, when you can get 4% plus yields in a sector that's probably not going away anytime soon, that can be pretty attractive to people. The question. Yeah. That's right. Go on. I was just going to say the question here is whether there are real drop

drivers that can make these stocks continue to rise this year. I think they're getting closer to points where that seems less likely.

I think these companies are well run. They're getting some more attraction from people who might think oil is not going to go away as soon as some had expected, but they're still playing in a market where most of the

most of the action looks bearish in the near future, at least through the end of this year. So when I look at Chevron, you know, I think that's one that's been trading, I believe, close to a 52 week high, if I'm not mistaken. Would you it sounds like you're not recommending that people buy this for a big breakout, though, that you'd be more cautious here.

Yeah, I think Chevron has been operating well. I think they started this project in Kazakhstan that's very promising. They have stuff going on in the Gulf that's also considered pretty promising. But they do have this legal case that's kind of hanging over their head where they're in arbitration with Exxon in order to buy the oil company Hess.

It's somewhat complicated case, but it has to do with Hess's stake in a project in Guyana. But the upshot is Chevron has this overhang on the stock. Now, if they win the Hess case, and analysts I talked to do seem to lean towards Chevron winning, but are not certain of that, the stock will probably get a bit of a bump.

But it is a little bit hard to buy a stock on the fundamentals when there is a legal overhang that people have to deal with.

And it's, as you pointed out, it's not, it's at a high P.E. for based on its recent trading activity. That's right. So let's, are there any, well, let's come back to stocks. Let's turn to the, you know, I think of oil when I think of the energy sector, but I know there's a lot more to it. Natural gas prices, I think if I was looking at the right contractor up about 30% this year, what's driving that strength when oil really is going nowhere?

Yeah, that's a great point. Natural gas has been, you know, for a long time, it was kind of oil's neglected cousin. It's become a much more interesting commodity over the past year or two. One of the biggest reasons is that the U.S. is now a very large exporter of natural gas in liquid form. There are all these export facilities on the Gulf Coast. Trump keeps approving even more. And we send millions of tons of

of liquefied natural gas all over the world. Whereas 10 years ago, we exported zero.

So we now have a lot more demand for natural gas. The U.S. has a lot of natural gas reserves. And with demand rising, that's really helped prices. I think another reason simply is the weather. Natural gas is used for heating and electricity, but the heating side can be a very big driver. This year was not an absolutely frigid year, depending on where you were. There were some places where it was, but it was...

It was relatively cold in Europe, which imports a lot of natural gas. Demand for electricity is going up, and natural gas is the largest source of electricity in the US and some other countries. So there's a lot of demand drivers, and people are pretty bullish about natural gas prices staying relatively high this year and maybe for the next few years.

How does that liquefied natural gas play into this? I know it's one where we're looking to export it. Are tariffs having any impact? And I guess I'm going to throw one more thing at you because it seems like there's so much going on. But you mentioned natural gas for electricity, and now with the AI trade, sort of

getting a little shadow over the AI trade. Does that get people? It doesn't look like it's impacted natural gas and the possibility that we might not need as much electricity as people might have thought. Yeah, it has impacted the natural gas a little bit. You know, not not as much as some of the tech stocks, but

I think there was a lot baked into even the pipeline stocks, which are generally considered sort of steady Eddie stocks that get paid for the volume they transport. Some of them have been trading at a particular premium because the excitement was that they were going to transport much more natural gas.

as these AI data centers demanded more natural gas. The president has talked about natural gas plants being located right next to data centers, pumping electricity directly into them. You know, there's a lot of excitement about it. I think there's some of that's hitting up against a physical reality. We simply don't have enough things like turbines. We don't even, I did a story recently, we don't even have enough electricians these days to

to make this all work. So I think the natural gas electricity trade is a little bit questionable. I think the LNG trade though is solid. I think that LNG is simply going to keep rising. I think the world is going to need much more of it in the years ahead. I think

Natural gas used to be thought of as kind of a bridge fuel to renewables. I think that's changing a little bit. I think clearly renewables are getting cheaper and are an enormously important part of the electricity mix. But I think that people expect natural gas to be the driver of electricity demand and global trade for probably a couple of decades.

And so are there any natural gas stocks that you like? I know, I think EQT might be the biggest pure play. Yeah, EQT and Expand Energy, which used to be Chesapeake, are both big players. They've done well, and those are well-run companies. I think

I think another one that I've been hearing about and I think has a good case behind it is Antero Resources, which has a lot of production that's right next to pipelines that go right to the Gulf for LNG export. LNG is exciting because you can...

uh you can sell into markets that are willing to pay a lot more for it so if in the u.s people are willing to pay four dollars per million btus which is the metric we use you know in other countries they're usually willing to spend 13 or 14 dollars uh for the same gas now there's there's a little bit of a cost for actually processing it and shipping it but you can still make very wide margins on lng and some of these natural gas companies are making deals

directly into the LNG market. So I think companies like Antero have a pretty strong future ahead. Are there any other LNG names that we should be watching? Another one I think is very interesting. It's called Chart Industries. They don't make the actual export facilities. They don't drill for natural gas, but they basically turn gases into liquids is kind of the very basic

idea behind what they do. They're a chemical processing company that super chills the gases into liquids, makes it easy to send them overseas. And they have contracts with all of the big

players in LNG. The LNG exporters are going to be involved in a very volatile business where over time it's probably going to be oversupplied and then maybe undersupplied and oversupplied again. But this is a real picks and shovels idea where you're buying a business that's going to grow as the industry expands. And that's trading at a...

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Discover more at viking.com. You know, pretty reasonable multiple. So I think that's a stock that definitely stood out to me. I mean, it's at about 11 times earnings and they have deals with like Exxon and other companies that are definitely going to move ahead with major expansions. And just for listeners, the ticker there is GTLS as in Sam. It's one I wasn't familiar with before.

Avi, let's turn to solar and other renewables. I mean, that seems to be quite a mess right now. How do you separate winners and losers? Yeah, that definitely has been a mess for more than a year. And President Trump's ideas about renewables aren't helping, of course.

He's been suspending grants and making it harder for renewable developers. At the same time, it's pretty clear solar isn't going anywhere. Wind is definitely hiccuping right now. I think that he has a particular animosity towards offshore wind, has totally stopped permitting and put a lot of projects on the rocks there. But I do think solar is cheap. It's becoming cheaper.

It's very powerful. And I think that there are still stocks that can do well. And solar and batteries are still going to be the largest new sources of power generation this year. So they're definitely not going anywhere. So one of them that has not done well lately, but I think

will probably rebound even in the event of some cuts to some of the subsidies that solar gets is First Solar. They're the biggest utility scale solar developer, meaning they are a solar manufacturer. So they make solar panels for big utilities. They're not the ones that go on people's homes. I think the ones that go on people's homes are in a

a really big mess right now. They have been for a while though, right? And this is not just a Trump thing. This has just not been a good business for- Yeah. No, absolutely. It's been a mess. A lot of that has to do simply with high interest rates. When somebody is going to put a $20,000 improvement on their house, they don't want to do it if they have to take out 8% loans on that. If they can take out back

back when interest rates were near zero, it was a lot more economically certain to do that kind of thing. So residential is kind of a mess. I do think utility is doing okay. The two companies I've written about recently positively are first solar, which makes those utilities scale panels, and then a company called Clearway Energy that basically develops solar and wind projects. They

they have a nice dividend yield as well, and they have continued to grow and been able to kind of operate around these headwinds. I mean, they're up 16% this year. They've got a 5.8% dividend yield. And analysts I talked to say that's very defensible too. - Interesting. How would you tell if the solar sector is bottoming? Is there something we should be looking at?

Yeah. You know, one of the things I've been watching lately is the big operators, what they're doing. I talked to Brookfield Asset Management, which is one of the most important players in renewables. And and what they're telling me is they're looking for bargains now, which is, you know, a pretty good sign for the industry when the smart money starts buying.

companies and they said that they're willing to buy publicly traded companies which are trading at remarkably low valuations. So I do think that's worth watching. I think it is hard to buy it while the Republicans may try to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, but it's definitely like this isn't this isn't going away. You know, I wouldn't buy residential solar, but I definitely would

would start sniffing around renewable energy stocks, watch what companies like Brookfield, KKR, what a lot of these smart money sort of private equity firms are doing. It's definitely worth watching. Yeah. And that was a question that Lee had was just about the sector attracting private equity interest. He was wondering if they're going to get more of that. And it sounds like the answer is yes. At some point, these stocks start to look interesting.

Yeah. Right. And let's talk about utilities just briefly, because you mentioned them earlier. They've been part of the AI trade. They're obviously a big cog in all the energy use that we have. Are they more than just an AI trade at this point? Or has that just really made them a lot, not quite the defense stocks, the defensive stocks they used to be?

Yeah, I think it's a feast or famine there. I think they were very excited to be included last year in the NVIDIA trade, not so much this year. Big names like Constellation and Vistra, which had done great, are down very sharply.

I think these are still very solid companies. I do think that we're going to need a little more clarity on where the AI trade goes from here and certain regulations. A company like Constellation, which owns nuclear reactors, is very attractive. That nuclear power is carbon free. Tech companies really like it.

But in order to sell that power to the tech companies at above average electricity rates, they're going to need a little more certainty from regulators like FERC. And some of these things people don't generally talk about. But it's a little dicey right now. I think owning the...

I think the long-term future for these companies is still strong. Owning so much infrastructure, it's very hard to replicate all this infrastructure in America. We're not building things fast enough. I think there's a hope, oh, we'll build hundreds of

natural gas power plants. Well, when I talk to the people actually building those plants, they say, fat chance, that's not going to happen. So if you actually own these plants or nuclear energy, the last ones we tried to build took 15 plus years. They're very powerful, impressive plants, but

expecting them to be the backbone of the next big NVIDIA chips. It's just not going to happen. So Constellation is going to be there with the nuclear power. Vistra is going to be there with natural gas and some nuclear too. And they're going to be the ones that profit off of a lot of that.

Yeah, it was just reminded me of a stock I used to trade way back in the day called Montana Power that got involved in the Internet trade. And they started doing fiber optic cables and it was not a good thing to do. But that's the big difference here seems to be just because this isn't something where there's just, you know, you can have a glut of.

fiber optic cables as you point out there's just not going to be a glut of power and we're actually using more power now i think regardless of the ai trade um it seems like it's going up yeah um so that'll be interesting to watch all right i want to ask you one more question before we go to reader questions um you got to talk to shell's ceo i write about that

Yeah, last week, while so on, I came to New York for their investor conference and he sat down with me and yeah, very interesting conversation. I think Shell has made some probably smart moves over the last couple of years under his leadership. They've gone pretty hard into LNG.

uh in general gas uh you know shell obviously historically is considered an oil company but they're actually going to have about equal amounts of sales in natural gas as they are in oil by the end of the decade and i do think the lng theme is not something that's going away they they trade these commodities very aggressively unlike the american companies which do some of that but for the most part the european companies and particularly shell are really at the center of

of this trade. And he told me that even if LNG prices fall, he thinks they're in a position to profit because they're able to move it to the most profitable markets. They do a lot of the trading, so they're not just producing. So that was I thought I think they have a good investment thesis right now. I think obviously trading

at much cheaper multiples also than the US names definitely makes them stand out. They traded 10 times expected earnings versus about 16 for Exxon. And I think...

Shell's LNG trade makes that look pretty cheap at the moment. Interesting. All right. So let's go to some reader questions. I'm going to jump through a bunch of these in the time we have. If there are any that you don't feel like answering, just you can say pass and we'll move on to the next one. Let me ask you first. This is from Harry. He wanted to know about pipeline stocks. How do they look to you?

Yeah, pipeline stocks have done very well. Williams Companies is up 50% in the past year. Kinder Morgan's up 55%. And it makes sense. I think natural gas is going to stick around. I think these companies transport an enormous amount of it.

And they've got decent dividends. I think there's a little bit of a pause in that right now. I don't know that people are plowing money into them after a run up like that. At the end of the day, they are.

are, you know, they do have their own physical constraints. It doesn't you can't build a pipeline in 10 minutes here there. But the value of obviously the value of the assets they have now is going up. Is it going up more than 50% in a year? I think that becomes a little bit more of a debatable proposition. But if you're looking for dividends, you know, it does make sense to look at these stocks. Okay.

Sounds good. Gerard wanted to know how important nuclear is moving forward. And is anybody making the nuclear fuel to power SMRs? Yeah, that's a great question. SMRs are these, just in case you're not deep into the nuclear world, they're these small modular reactors. In the US, we have 94 nuclear reactors. None of them are SMRs. They're all these big behemoths, the hydrogels.

large water reactors that people know. SMRs are a little more

innovative. They're meant to be smaller. They're meant to sometimes use different cooling methods, things like that. So they're kind of the hot new thing. And Google has partnered with one of them called Kairos. Microsoft has partnered with them. And the idea being this can create clean electricity for

and potentially be somewhat cheaper than the large reactors. So there are companies to play that, including NuScale and Oklo. I think they're both not, you know,

Those are still pretty risky stocks. They feel speculative. Yeah, I think extremely speculative. I've talked to people who just don't expect this really to materialize anywhere near as quickly as people expect. So I would be pretty reticent to put a bunch of money into this thinking that there's going to be any near-term resolution to this. I think nuclear fuel, though, is a very interesting area. I think

President Biden and President Trump agree on this maybe more than anything else is that nuclear can be an American-made

growth engine. I think America invented the commercial nuclear industry, but it's begun to fall behind to countries like China. We simply don't have the workforce. We haven't continued to build these reactors. They've taken much longer than expected, but there is a pretty strong movement toward building these things. And the companies that make the fuel are

can certainly benefit from that. I think it's part of the whole Made in America push that both the presidents cared about. This company, Cameco, which is actually a Canadian company, but they have U.S. production of uranium. They're pretty attractive. They also own about half of Westinghouse, which is the dominant designer of nuclear reactors. They design reactors in the U.S. and overseas.

That was a very smart purchase they made a few years ago. Yeah, I can remember nobody wanted to own Westinghouse. Yeah, exactly. And now Westinghouse is designing reactors in Eastern Europe and all over the world. So that's been great. So Cameco, there's some smaller U.S. names like UEC that have also attracted some interest and are starting to mine uranium now.

uh in places where you know that had been a dead industry uh they're also uh companies that enrich uranium including the this uh high assay low enrichment uranium anyway that's what the smrs use some of this stuff you you have you start becoming feeling like you're just a bad nuclear physicist talking about but in general uh companies uh that are getting into that um are

I think pretty interesting. This one called Centris Energy that has gotten some contracts to start doing that work. Those stocks have not done great this year. I think part of that is the unwinding of the AI trade, but I do think the Centris Energy, UEC, and Camecos of the world are worth looking at and worth learning about, even if you're not a nuclear physicist.

Got it. All right. Michael wants to know what the impact of Energy Secretary Chris Wright's policies will be on the sector over the short and the long term.

Sure. So Chris Wright's an interesting guy. He was the CEO of Liberty Energy, one of the major oil services companies. Basically, you want to frack a well, you're going to call his company and he's going to figure it out for you. And they were pretty successful in that. But he's also a guy who has done

research and investing in areas outside of oil and gas, including he was on the board of nuclear company, Oklo. He's made investments in geothermal company, Fervo. So, you know, I think that it remains a little bit to be seen exactly

he and Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior and all part of Trump's sort of Energy Dominance Council, as he calls it, are going to actually change things. But I think the question is, for prices, their policies are probably on net bearish. The Trump administration has reduced

environmental regulations in ways that probably go even beyond what anyone had expected to the point of basically not regulating things like methane, which had been sort of a given under many prior administrations. So we'll see how that plays out, if that actually even benefits the oil companies. Obviously, it's a big anxiety for environmentalists. I think a lot of what's going on now is happening faster than anyone expected. So

I would say, you know, it's a long way of saying I don't know that Wright himself is a reason to play any particular stocks or take a strong position on oil and gas or even the industries like nuclear that he has been favorable to in the past, simply because the larger economics, I think, are a much bigger deal for these areas. So I think it's still tough to invest around what exactly the Trump administration's policies will be.

All right. Okay. So Lee would really like to know where Exxon is going to be 20 years from now, or just is there a future there? We haven't really talked about them much yet. They'll still be in Houston, I think. I think

They are a savvy company that was part of the invention of lithium batteries. They're doing carbon capture stuff, very small businesses. But they're a company that I think

has a future in some form, no matter how fast the energy transition happens. You know, they're doing some investment in things beyond oil now, but I know I think oil will be the bulk of their operations for the next 15 to 20 years. The question is, how quickly does the energy transition happen? But I don't think that's a company that's going away. I think they're

they've got their hands in almost every pot in energy aside from direct electricity generation through wind and solar. They're mining, you know, they have plans to mine lithium. They have plans to use hydrogen. They're doing carbon capture. They're obviously deep in natural gas, oil, and chemicals. So I don't think that's a company that's going away. And they've got

probably the best deep water operation out there with their Guyana find. So I think for the next decade, they'll probably look a lot like Exxon does today. All right. And then TJ wanted to know about Venture Global. Notes that it has dropped since its IPO. Its net valuation is now similar to LNG. Do you have an outlook on that one?

Yeah, I mean, that's been a very dramatic story. They were going to go public at as much as $110 billion valuation. They eventually went public at about half that level, and then they've fallen more than 50%. So it's been a stock that I think investors are anxious about. They're growing very fast.

but they're involved in pretty contentious arbitration proceedings with some of their buyers. They are potentially going to be overproducing, at least in general, the LNG market may be oversupplied within a year or two. So they would be very exposed to that. They're

2025 earnings expectations came in well below analysts' expectations. So I think that's what you'd call a show-me story. I think you really have to see a pretty serious

changes operationally for people to get interested in investing in that company again because at the moment it's been several disappointments despite them being you know the fastest growing of the LNG makers and seeming to have a lot of support from the president and his advisors who have gone and visited Venture Global's facilities already

all right uh let's do two last questions here one is about energy companies uh tim asks do they intend to continue environmental protective measures regardless of a more lenient trump administration uh guidelines there yeah you know they for the most part tell me that they're going to continue

and methane is probably the most in a lot of ways the most uh important one of those that there are oil and gas companies that have you know part are part of a coalition they share ideas on how to reduce methane methane is much more potent uh than carbon dioxide uh in heating the atmosphere uh you know it's a very serious problem and and these companies have built technology to

to try to cut it off at the source because it leaks from all sorts of areas within oil and gas, from the wells, from the pipelines, from export facilities to some degree. So I do think that the big companies probably will continue at least on that path.

path on some of the other stuff. I don't know. I mean, the rollback of regulations, I think, is unprecedented at this point. The EPA has simply cut so many things. So it's definitely worth watching.

I think smaller companies are probably more likely and private companies are more likely to pollute more on a, you know, on a sort of, I guess, per barrel of oil or, you know, ton of natural gas kind of basis. But so I'd say that in general, I think pollution is going to rise. I think the big companies are going to stick for the most part to the plans they've already made.

Okay. Do you have any thoughts on SLB? I know that was a Andrew Barry pick a while ago, and I think we're still down a little bit on it, maybe two or 3%. Do you have any thoughts on that one? Yeah. SLB, and I'm sorry, I haven't studied it in, you know, this year so far, but it's obviously, it's had a kind of tough year in the past year. I think

They, you know, they've got some high tech operations. I talked to them about how they were using AI. They've become one of the key companies helping oil companies use AI. I think, you know, the concern for them, I think, is

as oil services as as oil companies become much more lean and they're able to produce more oil uh with much less spending and much less need for services the need for uh for slb uh goes down to some degree but it is still it's one of those companies that is going to be around uh they play an important role they're they're becoming more high tech uh so there's definitely still

an investment case we made for them, a decent dividend yield. And we'll see. If there are operations, particularly overseas, where they're clearly the dominant player that continue, if you see Saudi Arabia really bringing back oil in a big way, I think SLB could be one of the big beneficiaries.

All right. Well, I think that with that we can call it a call. So Avi, thank you so much for being here. Lauren will be back next Monday. Same time, same login. We'll be joined by Adam Parker. He's the current CEO of a firm called Trivariate and the former former strategist at Morgan Stanley. He'll be here to discuss this chaotic market, where it could be headed next and the best stocks and sectors for head spinning macro environment.

I just want to thank you all for joining us and happy investing.