Locator: 49911IRAN.
As the analysis shows, 2025 was not simply a story of “energy underperformance,” but rather a reminder that in volatile markets, financial structure matters as much as resource quality — and that leverage can be either a tailwind or a headwind, depending on which way the commodity breezes are blowing. Yet beneath the surface, performance across the sector was far from uniform. Some Gas-Weighted E&Ps thrived as natural gas prices recovered, while Oil-Weighted and Diversified E&Ps struggled to convince investors they could navigate a weaker crude environment without balance-sheet stress.
Figure 1 below shows the relative 2025 performance of the S&P 500 (gray line), SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (XOP; blue line) and WTI oil prices (orange line), all indexed to 100 starting on January 2, 2025. The S&P 500 outpaced the other two indices with a nearly 17% gain in 2025, while the XOP, an index of E&P companies, fell about 6% and WTI plunged by more than 20%. Henry Hub natural gas prices (not pictured) gyrated wildly during 2025, finally increasing 1% on the year. The median stock price change for our peer group of 35 companies was a 4% loss. The Gas-Weighted E&Ps were the best-performing peer group, sporting a 13% gain, while the Oil-Weighted E&Ps and the Diversified E&Ps fell by 11% and 20%, respectively. The poor performance of the Diversified E&Ps was influenced by the heavy debt load held by many of its companies. (More on that shortly).
