At the end of March, we published a piece on why the war in Iran could continue longer than expected and another piece on how the consequences of the conflict may be seriously underestimated. Before we dive into the bull-case on energy, the KCR team would like to clarify that the human suffering that may be coming from the war – successful peace deal or not – is front-and-center in our minds. This research lays out a bull case for energy stocks that does not include any of the recent price-spikes in oil. All the data on the following pages is using realized historical data from company financials when WTI’s average price was < $65.
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Since KCR’s first bullish energy publication in March 2020, the energy sector has delivered a staggering ~500% return, handily beating the ~300% return of the tech sector and dwarfing the S&P 500’s ~210% gain over the same period. Across three of our four publication dates, energy has decisively beaten both tech and the broad market, demonstrating that the bullish thesis was not a one-time lucky call but a consistently validated investment framework. Even from the most recent publication in March 2022 — the only period where tech has beaten energy — the energy sector has still returned roughly 80%, outpacing the S&P 500’s ~68%.
- From the March 2020 and September 2021 publications, energy trounced the return of the tech sector, which is remarkable given that this period encompassed one of the strongest tech rallies in history driven by AI enthusiasm and mega-cap dominance.
- The consistency of outperformance across four distinct entry points — spanning vastly different market environments from the COVID crash through the post-reopening inflation cycle — suggests the energy trade has been driven by durable fundamentals like capital discipline and FCF generation, not short-term commodity speculation.
- The chart below serves as a powerful rebuttal to the common narrative that tech is the only game in town: the most neglected, lowest-weighted sector in the S&P 500 has quietly been the market’s best performer over a five-year stretch, rewarding investors who followed the fundamentals rather than consensus positioning.
Energy’s share of the S&P 500 has…
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April 10, 2026 |
| Authors: Matthew Malgari, Nathan Przybylo, Dr. Sanjeev Bhojraj and John Durkin
April 10, 2026
Authors: Matthew Malgari, Nathan Przybylo, Dr. Sanjeev Bhojraj and John Durkin
