Mike Vinokur Cenovus Energy CVE-T TOP PICK Jun 09, 2025

A value trap. The ultimate catalyst (fixing their downstream) keeps getting deferred and deferred. Share buybacks in recent months is sluggish. A very cheap stock, but downstream keeps biting them. He's cheering for them, but look at CNQ instead.

Coming into the time when you want to own energy, between mid-February and May/June. Chart shows it's at, or maybe below, support. He'd need to see a bounce to be bullish on it. Watch for another 2 weeks or so; if it breaks down, you have to get out.

Downstream operations have been extremely weak. Look at the dividend history. They've cut the dividend in the past, so not a stable dividend payer. Dividend looks high because stock price is low. Look elsewhere.

High exposure to price of oil and to the differential of Canadian heavy oil (back to almost-new lows). Upstream is going exceedingly well. But downstream has poor utilization rates, mishaps, negative EBITDA; those are all the reasons it's massively lagged peers. Fix that, and good rerate potential; won't play out until latter half of 2025 or early 2026.

If you own, he'd hesitate to sell. He's watching, near the top of his list to deploy capital. You could wake up one morning to a big pop in the stock price.

Unique in that they own US refineries. Negative energy story has brought stock down. 

Lots of capex to fix issues with refining assets. Sold last September when sentiment soured on price of oil. Investor sentiment muted even when company reached deleveraging targets. Nothing materially wrong with it, whole industry has rolled over. Sharp management, committed to investors.

When he's ready to get back into energy, he'd buy this at a much smaller weight and buy some SU as well.

They are righting the ship, as seen in their last quarterly call. They've always held super upstream assets with no mine-life depletion issues. Fair value is higher, but they lack a catalyst. We won't see improvement in their downstream until Q3. Likes the management team.

Likes energy right now. Stock's come off sharply, energy prices have not been friendly. Decent long-term prospects. Energy prices should rebound, doesn't see them plummeting. With a long time horizon, pullback is a buying opportunity.

Showing good downstream turnarounds. Look beyond 2025, when tariffs will have been resolved. Energy should bypass a lot of that because of how strategic it is, so we're not going to see a 50% tariff. Buy this and sleep at night, because you don't have to worry about tariff implications a few months from now.