Venezuela Changes Everything: Two Oil Stocks to Watch VIEW IN BROWSER By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily In This Digest: - The opening act of a volatile 2026?
- We’ve built tools to help you navigate this uncertainty
- Why are oil stocks up today?
- It’s much more than an energy fuel
- This quality oil stock is already in a strong uptrend
- And this stock’s uptrend is just beginning
On Saturday morning, the world woke up to a real tone-setter… At 3:17 a.m. ET on Saturday, Jan. 3, President Trump posted a photo on social media that may just set the tone for 2026. A blindfolded, earmuffed Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, sat aboard a U.S. Navy ship – wrists bound and hands clasping a bottle of water. U.S. Delta Force soldiers snatched him and his wife from their Caracas home in the middle of the night, while laying down suppressing airstrikes on nearby Venezuelan military centers. By sunrise, the White House had declared an end to Maduro’s 12-year regime. Maduro and his wife were in federal custody and headed to New York to face drug-trafficking charges. Hours later, Trump – flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – shared plans to “run the country” and its natural resources. Venezuela is home to the largest proven oil reserves in the world, at more than 300 billion barrels. Trump said the U.S. would take control of these reserves, invest “billions” of dollars into oil drilling infrastructure, and sell the oil around the world. This has one word written all over it: uncertainty… It’s investors’ least favorite word… and one we may have to quickly get used to this year. That’s because of all the unanswered questions: - Who will now run Venezuela and lead its nearly 30 million citizens?
- How long will it take to fix its crumbling energy infrastructure?
- What will it cost? And who will pay for it?
- How does this impact the global energy markets?
- How will Venezuela’s key allies – Iran, Russia, and China – react?
- Will China now make its long-signaled move on Taiwan, which produces more than 60% of the world’s semiconductors?
There are far more questions than we can ever answer here in TradeSmith Daily. And we’re not in the business of answering complex geopolitical questions. We’ll leave that to folks more qualified than we are. But we can do what we do best and look at the situation through the lens of data and help you trade it. Recommended Link | | Will you potentially make money or lose money in the U.S. stock market in 2026? According to the 50-year Wall Street legend who invented one of Wall Street’s most popular buying and selling indicators – the answer has nothing to do with AI, quantum computing, or cryptos. Instead, it all comes down to the #1 stock he recommends you BUY now…And the #1 stock he recommends you SELL now. |  | |
TradeSmith is built for uncertain times like this… We don’t just give you our opinion on the market and send you on your way. Opinions are a dime a dozen. Instead, we back up our ideas with cold, hard data. And unlike most folks, we don’t assume an unending bull market, either. As you’ll know if you’re a longtime reader, we’ve spent much of the last year building tools designed specifically for market uncertainty just like this. So, let’s now use some of TradeSmith’s tools to look at the asset caught in the Venezuelan crossfire: oil. Brent crude (the global benchmark) futures had a volatile overnight session. After dropping about 2%, they’re up at this writing by 0.6%. And major oil companies are up even more as I write in premarket trading. Exxon Mobil (XOM) is up 2.5%. And the Venezuela-exposed Chevron (CVX) is up 6.5%. But how can this be? If the White House pledged to unlock Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, shouldn’t that imply greater supply and lower prices? In time, that may be true. But as it stands right now, the roughly 1 million barrels a day Venezuela produced are now effectively offline. That’s a supply crunch, and one with no known end date. And oil powers the world economy… Despite the rise of electric vehicles, it still powers 90% of transport globally. Beyond that, oil is used to generate electricity (about 3% of global use), plus make plastics, textiles, chemicals, building materials, and other baseline ingredients for consumer products. Oil drives almost everything. You’re probably within arm’s reach of at least three things that couldn’t exist without it. And for reasons we just described, looking at oil stocks may be tempting right now. If the U.S. helps Venezuela tap more oil, prices could come down further. But there’s no guarantee that will happen. So oil is in the bullish spotlight for the time being. It helps that of all the major market sectors, the average stock in the Energy Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLE) trades at the lowest price-to-earnings ratio of about 18. That’s around its 10-year average. Of course, there are winners to find and losers to avoid in every sector. We’ll look for some winners today with TradeSmith’s tools by looking through two lenses: fundamental and technical. For fundamental analysis – tracking things like a company’s earnings, revenue, and profit margin growth – let’s look to Jason Bodner’s Quantum Score. Jason Bodner created the Quantum Edge system to find those needles in the haystack. The less than 1% of stocks that exhibit elite fundamental strength and technical strength. In Jason’s view, that includes Big Money flowing in from institutional investors on Wall Street. Formerly a senior derivatives trader on Wall Street, his job was to pair up big institutional buyers with sellers. And in seeing hundreds of multimillion-dollar trades pass through his hands, he found that combination made all the difference for his trades. Jason took both these factors and quantified them into the Quantum Score. The higher the score, the better the stock. Our backtest from 1990 through 2023 found that holding the top Quantum Score stocks on a six-month rotation resulted in outperformance of more than 5x the S&P 500. So we’ll search through the TradeSmith database for large-, mid-, and small-cap oil-and-gas stocks that rank highly on Jason’s Quantum Score. When we do, one name sticks out: $19 billion UK-based energy services firm TechnipFMC (FTI). The stock rates highly overall, at just over a 91. In fact, it’s the highest in our system in the oil and gas sector: 
And FTI’s Technical score, which measures price momentum and recent Big Money buying signals, is carrying more of the load at a 95.4. It’s also been on a tear ever since its Short-Term Health Buy signal – aka its Flash Buy – triggered back on May 21, 2025: 
Our Short-Term Health Buy signal is one of our newest indicators. Some of you may know it as the Flash Signal. Think of it like a shorter-term version of our foundational Health indicator, which uses a stock’s long-term volatility to determine its current trend. We built it to help you better deal with a market that’s been rapidly shifting beneath our feet for the past three years. It’s designed to help you catch big new uptrends in their early stages… and to warn you before those trends shift down. The proof of its value is right in front of you. Since FTI saw its Short-Term Health Buy signal, the stock is up nearly 59%. But there are plenty of fresher opportunities out there, too. Take a look at this chart of Antero Midstream (AM)… Antero just flashed a fresh Short-Term Health buy signal after a period of sideways price action for the past few months. And after the previous Short-Term Health buy signal in September, this stock rallied from $17.57 to an all-time high of $19.24: 
Antero Midstream is a U.S. midstream energy company that owns, operates, and develops infrastructure to transport and process natural gas and related products, mainly in the Appalachian Basin (West Virginia and Ohio). Zooming out to when Antero Midstream went public in 2017, we can see how those runs of green on Short-Term Health correlated with a strong uptrend: 
AM earns a more middling Quantum Score, at 60.3. But its Fundamental score is a respectable 75. And the Technical score, at 50, reflects the recent anemic price action. 
AM is certainly more speculative right now, but it could be an oil pick worth trading as the world digests the news on Venezuela. To building wealth beyond measure, 
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily | 
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