If You Invested $10,000 in OXY in 2020, This Is How Much You Would Have Today

For folks who'd prefer to avoid the rough-and-tumble world of oil futures trading, a less direct option is to hold shares of well-known drillers like Occidental Petroleum (NYSE: OXY). That way, they can capture the upside of big oil-price moves while staking a claim in an established name with a big market capitalization.

How has this strategy panned out over the last couple of years? It's fun and instructive to play hindsight quarterback and calculate the gains you would have reaped if you had bought a stock at just the right time. In the case of Occidental shares, buying when there was blood (or perhaps oil) in the streets would have been a brilliant move -- and this begs the question of whether there are more gains to be made by this commodities-market mainstay.

When the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price briefly crashed to a minus $40 per barrel on April 20, 2020, the broader stock market was starting to recover from the March lows, but some oil stocks would continue to struggle. A case in point would be Occidental Petroleum, which hit a short-term trough slightly below $10 in March 2020, only to plumb new depths below $9 in October of that year.

Source Fool.com