Better Buy: Phillips 66 vs. HollyFrontier Corp.

If you only pay attention to energy exploration and production (E&P) companies, then you're missing a huge part of the industry's profit-making potential. Refiners such as Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) and HollyFrontier (NYSE: HFC) provide a market for the production from oil and gas E&P specialists, and they aim to profit on the spreads they can earn between what they pay for crude oil and what they receive for the refined energy products they make. The two companies also have other businesses beyond refining, such as Phillips 66's midstream operations and chemical manufacturing facilities and HollyFrontier's Petro-Canada lubricants business.

As energy remains volatile, investors want to know which of these refinery stocks makes more sense right now. Let's look at Phillips 66 and HollyFrontier using a variety of key metrics to see which one might be the better buy for investors.

Phillips 66 and HollyFrontier have seen quite similar performance in their stock prices over the past year. Both of the stocks have seen roughly 6% gains since August 2016, with Phillips 66 having a very slight advantage.

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Source: Fool.com