Quick Read – XLE has surged 31% year-to-date, nearly four times the S&P 500’s return, with Exxon and Chevron alone comprising 41% of the concentrated fund. – Exxon beat earnings estimates by 15% and Chevron by 46% as the Strait of Hormuz closure drove Brent crude to $138 per…
rrel in April. – Hormuz reopening would deflate XLE’s risk premium toward $75 crude, while OPEC spare capacity shrinking to 2.5M bpd means future disruptions hit harder. – Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Energy Select Sector SPDR ETF didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today
If you put $10,000 into the Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (NYSEARCA:XLE) on the last trading day of 2025 and forgot about it, you would be sitting on roughly $13,131 as of the June 8 close. The same $10,000 in the S&P 500 would be worth about $10,840. Energy, the sector everyone wrote off as a value trap stuck behind the AI trade, is up about 31% year to date against 8.4% for SPY.
That gap, almost 23 points in five months, is the single most surprising scoreboard in the 2026 market. The headline you may have seen says 29%. The actual number is a touch better.