Article originally published by Stockhead.

With the ongoing energy crisis keeping gas prices elevated, Australian oil and gas explorers were quick to catch the attention of predatory investors over the last 12 months with exploration (and development) success top of the shopping list.

While some of these gains have been tempered as concerns of a looming recession gather force. It’s fair to say both ends of the market still feature many oil and gas outperformers with still rising stock prices that are apparently impervious to any old headwind.

Not even the crystallisation of a government-led market intervention, (and capped prices are top of that list), are slowing these market darlings down, a decent indicator that energy is going to remain front and centre into 2023.

And why shouldn’t it?
Both around the major global markets and here at home, the Energy Sectors (ours is the ASX/XEJ) pretty much laughed their way through 2022, surrounded by mainly tears and tantrums.

The XEJ is about 40% higher today than it was a year ago.