A better bet: that oil prices won't spend much time below $60/bbl. That's thanks in part to the industry-wide PTSD from 2020 (as well as 2016's OPEC Shale Slamdown) which transformed once-aggressive young frackers into prudent capital allocators. No one is still drilling uneconomic wells just to hold onto leases. As a result the balance sheets of independent American oil companies are stronger than they've been in a generation, and valuations embarrassingly low. A preferred valuation metric these days is EV/Ebitda, or enterprise value (equity plus debt) divided by Ebitda (operating income). By this measure nearly all American oil companies look cheap, with Occidental Petroleum coming in on the high side at 5.1x EV/Ebitda. Occidental might be worth the premium because of an implied put from "Uncle Warren" — Berkshire Hathaway owns 34% of Oxy shares and at a current $38.75 could buy the rest for about $25 billion (and still have $300 billion of cash on hand).