Smallish Canadian Oil Company Vermillion Energy (NYSE: VET) with a surprisingly solid outlook.

Disclosure: I have a 2000$ish stake in this company that I entered a few months ago.

Vermillion Energy deceptively appears to be a boring AF Canadian oil company, rightfully valued at a highly conservative P/E of 2.4 because of the thin margins of Canadian shale that will throw a company dependent on it way into the red once oil prices start to dip. Meanwhile, the stock chart looks entirely soul-crushing since 2014 and until very recently.

Quite uniquely, however, one would be foolish to call Vermillion a Canadian shale company, as despite being based in Canada and having 2/3 of their yearly production in Canada, 60% of their free cash flow comes from outside of Canada. This is because the rest of their production is extremely high-margin oil and gas in Europe. They produce 60% of Ireland's natural gas, more than two-thirds of France's Oil production, and a decent chunk of both Germany's and especially the Netherlands' natural gas, not to mention having rights to drill in over 1.7 million acres of undeveloped land stretching between Slovakia and Croatia.

Now because of how much money they made in 2021-22 as a result of especially elevated European pricing, they paid down their debt to less than 1x their free cash flow, and since they immediately hedged more than half of their 2023-2024 production, and since oil prices, and to a certain extent gas prices have remained high, they will again have massive profits, and this time with their very conservative debt targets reached so that they can send most of it to their shareholders. They are repurchasing shares at the maximum legal rate of 10% of the float every 12 months, and they are saying they will double the dividend to ~4% (at current prices) by the end of this year, and then ~8% (again at current price) in 2024. And despite all of that, they would only be using ~50% of their free cash flow in 2024, and that's with some rather conservative estimates for commodity prices that have had to be re-evaluated as oil has stayed higher than expected.

Overall a very solid company that will not only print dividends but is recently up ~20% with tons of room to grow.