So the Russians are reopening gas flows to Germany. The continent has dodged a bullet . . . but winter is coming. In my view, there’s only one trade in Europe until the energy markets calm down.

And it’s as simple as it gets. Build a portfolio of the continent’s oil stocks. You don’t need to make it fancy. Just accumulate the 4-5 companies that matter, roughly in order of size:

Shell (SHEL) and BP (BP) from the UK. Giant companies, critical to keeping the lights on in London and beyond. Losing Russia stung their strategic position but they’re both up YTD, which is impressive.

Total (TTE) from France. The only major left in the European Union that matters. If you want to stretch, pick up a little Eni (E) from Italy as well . . . but the cloud over the continent right now means both stocks have lagged the pack.

Make sure you get some Equinor (EQNR) though. Norwegian. The North Sea is critical to weaning Europe off Russian supplies. This is probably one of the most important companies on the planet right now.

And that’s it. You can drill down from there into niche producers, but these five stocks represent 95% of all market capitalization for Euro energy stocks that you can trade in the USA. This is the status quo.

Build a market-weighted portfolio out of these stocks and you’re up 10% YTD. Not spectacular but not bad, either. You could have deployed a similar strategy with the Euro banks . . . and you’d be down 12% over the same time period.

One sector call, 22 percentage points of outperformance. Turning a loss into a win. What could be simpler?

But hey . . . our own Exxon (XOM) and Chevron (CVX) do a lot of business in Europe too. You could just buy them and make money from the effort to keep the continent’s tanks from going dry.