That oil giant Wall Street is suddenly bullish on has lagged rivals through two energy crises and is *now* the value play? Per MarketWatch, this is when you should be most skeptical. The energy sector has a way of making the worst performer look cheap right before it proves why it was cheap. Relative underperformance over a decade isn't a timing signal: it's usually signal that the business model got structurally worse. $XOM CVX have kept pace by making hard calls on capex and buybacks. The laggard didn't, and one analyst call doesn't fix that.