Are Oil Stocks a Hedge Against Tech? XOM, CVX and COP vs. 6,809 US Stocks
Brent crude is back above $110 a barrel, and the usual question follows: do energy stocks move the other way from tech?
Correlworks lines up each stock against every other US-listed stock (NASDAQ, NYSE, NYSE American) and measures the Pearson correlation of their daily closing prices over about five years. Instead of one number against an index, you get a distribution: thousands of pairs, and what share of them are positive or negative.
Oil majors lean negative. Big tech doesn't, at least not as hard.
| Ticker | Pairs | Negative pairs | Mean | Strong − (≤−0.7) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| XOM (Exxon Mobil) | 6,809 | 64.1% | −0.217 | 32.4% |
| COP (ConocoPhillips) | 6,809 | 63.6% | −0.203 | 25.9% |
| OXY (Occidental) | 6,809 | 63.3% | −0.201 | 23.3% |
| CVX (Chevron) | 6,809 | 61.8% | −0.182 | 22.3% |
| EOG (EOG Resources) | 6,809 | 61.4% | −0.164 | 22.2% |
| TTE (TotalEnergies) | 6,806 | 69.7% | −0.248 | 19.8% |
| NVDA (Nvidia) | 6,809 | 61.3% | −0.072 | 7.7% |
| AAPL (Apple) | 6,809 | 59.7% | −0.076 | 8.8% |
| MSFT (Microsoft) | 6,809 | 58.6% | −0.052 | 7.0% |
The negative shares look close. The tails don't. Roughly one in three of Exxon's pairs sat at −0.7 or below, against fewer than one in ten for Nvidia, Apple or Microsoft. For XOM, COP, OXY, CVX and EOG the single most common correlation range was −0.9 to −0.8; for the three tech names it was −0.7 to −0.6.
Refiners and services tell the same story
| Ticker | Negative pairs | Mean | Strong − (≤−0.7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| MPC (Marathon Petroleum) | 64.4% | −0.201 | 30.4% |
| PSX (Phillips 66) | 63.3% | −0.151 | 15.6% |
| SLB (Schlumberger) | 63.5% | −0.178 | 18.0% |
| HAL (Halliburton) | 61.6% | −0.144 | 9.5% |
- The SIC sector Petroleum Refining (14 stocks, which also includes XOM, CVX and COP) has an average correlation of −0.170, and none of its members averages above zero.
- Smaller producers are mixed. The Crude Petroleum & Natural Gas sector (64 stocks) averages only −0.048, and 19 of its members average above zero.
What this does and doesn't tell you
- These are correlations of price levels, not daily returns, over a fixed five-year window. A strongly negative number says two stocks trended in opposite directions over that period. It doesn't say Exxon rises on the day Nvidia falls. If you want a day-to-day hedge, look at return correlations over a shorter window, on current data.
- Shares and averages are computed from the binned distribution shown on each stock page.
- The data ends June 2025. A refresh is in progress.
- Correlation is not causation and not a trading signal.
What the distribution does show is that large oil names spent those five years on a different path from most of the market, and much more consistently so than megacap tech.
Explore it yourself
The free stock pages show each full histogram: XOM, CVX, COP, OXY, NVDA. You can compare any of ~6,800 US-listed stocks the same way, no sign-up needed. See also the most negatively correlated stocks and the methodology page.