As you can see in the following table, energy stocks have been ugly over the last 1-month (i.e. lots of “red”). Nonetheless, the sector remains very strong year-to-date.
At a time when the fed is fighting high inflation, domestic energy is out-of-favor with the current administration and the Russia-Ukraine war pressures the sector, energy has been extremely volatile.
However, higher oil prices have actually strengthened many of the stocks in the table above thereby better enabling them to weather future volatility and keep paying big steady dividends (for example, Exxon Mobil has increased its dividend payment every year for more than 10-year straight, as you can see in the table above). We are currently long BP and Exxon Mobil in the Income Equity Portfolio.