Buy This, Not That: A $750 Billion Windfall Makes This LNG Giant a Winner

Shah Gilani|July 30, 2025

The energy markets just got turned upside down…

Trump’s deal with the European Union is massive – a $750 billion commitment to buy U.S. energy assets, plus another $600 billion in U.S. investments.

That’s a game-changer for American LNG companies. But not all of them are positioned to capitalize equally.

Today I’m comparing two of the biggest players in the space… and the difference between them might surprise you.

One company crashed 70% from its IPO highs and is still showing technical weakness. The other has been steadily building strength and looks ready to capitalize on this European windfall.

The choice between them isn’t even close when you see the charts and fundamentals side by side.

Click on the thumbnail below to see which LNG giant deserves your investment dollars.

Transcript

Hey everybody, Shah Gilani here with your weekly BTNT, as in Buy This, Not That. I’m going to talk about two LNG players today. Why? Because LNG in particular is in the news. And why? Well, with the president’s deal with the EU having come to fruition for the most part, he wrangled a $750 billion commitment from the EU to buy US energy.

That’s on top of a $600 billion investment in the US. Who knows, maybe that investment money, some of it will flow into energy because that’s what the European Union wants to buy from Americans. They want to buy LNG for the most part. And some, yes, oil assets too, but LNG is huge across Europe.

And so it makes sense that a lot of that $750 billion will likely go towards buying LNG assets. That’s why today, I’m going to talk about two big US players in the LNG space. One of them is VG symbol, that’s Venture Global, and the other is LNG symbol, and that’s Cheniere Energy. Now, Venture Global, just backing up one second.

Reason that I’ve gotten a lot of questions about LNG players, and these two are pretty close on a lot of levels, is this quote from Ursula von der Leyen, who is a German politician who has been president of the European Commission since, I believe, 2019. So this is what she said at the meeting with Trump when it was decided that the tariffs were going to be 15% on EU goods and services and that the European Union was going to invest $750 billion in US energy assets, buy $750 billion worth of US energy assets. Her quote was, “We will replace Russian gas and oil with significant purchases of US LNG and nuclear fuels.”

So that’s why we’re putting LNG against VG today. So let’s start with Venture Global. Venture Global is a fairly new company. I’m going to pull up a chart for you on Venture Global because Venture Global really was a private company, started in 2013 by really smart investment banker by the name of Mike Sabel, who is now probably worth close to $15 billion. So very smart and now very, very rich.

And a legal attorney by the name of Bob Pender. Now those two started Venture Global in 2013, grew it very quickly, borrowed a lot of money to do so. But obviously certainly had the clout to borrow the money and to see what they were doing to fruition and in a good way because Venture Global exploded. So much so that they decided to cash in considerably by taking it public.

Now, here’s a look. Let me pull up the chart for you guys.

Here’s a look at what the chart looks like. So just a little bit slow on the uptake here with my computer.

And hopefully this will work here.

Okay, good. So here’s Venture Global. Now Venture Global went public back here, and the expectations were so high. This is January 24th, 2025.

The expectations were for the company to come out with a valuation close to $60 billion, which would make it a larger capitalization company than LNG, which has been around for years. So Cheniere, which has been around for years, was about to be eclipsed by Venture Global. So, stock opens up and then proceeds to just absolutely collapse. And all the way down here, on April 7th, the Trump tariff tantrum day sees an intraday low of $6.75.

So we go from $24 to $6.75. And the high on the open was $25.50. And that’s a heck of a drop when we’ve seen a bounce back. What I don’t like about Venture Global is I don’t like chart wise, pattern wise, I don’t like this because the expectations were so high that if you bought in the IPO, you are absolutely hammered.

Okay, it’s an opportunity here to buy low if you had the maybe guts to buy down there.

But given its assets, probably would have been a great play.

However, a lot of people were watching this and going well, maybe this was overblown from the start. Mike Sabel, very smart guy, maybe a little too clever for his own good. So anyway, the stock continued to rise. But now we’ve got this little descending pattern here.

Now, if I was to draw a line here, we’d have a descending triangle, in which case if we broke down below $14, I think there’s an opportunity to get Venture Global lower. So Venture Global is not the buy here. I think Venture Global can go lower. It’s going to test this pattern.

And if it breaks down below $14, then it’s probably worth looking at. I don’t know at what level. But what I do like about Venture Global is it was north of almost a $60 billion market cap company. And that market cap is $37 billion, $37.4 billion. That’s a big drop in market cap.

As far as the revenue, $0.5 billion annual revenue. Profit margin, very hefty 23.34%. So numbers look good. Now, as far as the balance sheet goes, got $3.74 billion in cash and a ton of debt, $30.17 billion.

You don’t grow that fast without leveraging yourself in order to grow that fast. So sitting on a ton of debt, the operating margins are really good. The leveraged free cash flow is good. So everything is good as far as debt service and the balance sheet goes.

It’s just debt to equity, that’s not a healthy number. But as long as they can grow their revenue and their quarterly revenue growth year over year, 104%. If they can keep that up, then the stock will be a buy. Hopefully, it breaks down and maybe becomes a buy a good bit lower.

But to me, it’s not a buy right now. It’s just, it’s kind of just making its way. And it didn’t have a good enough move, in my opinion, given the fact that it looked cheap relative to where it come down to, relative to this action.

Given the news last week when we found out that the European Union commission had agreed to buy $750 billion worth of US energy assets, you would have thought Venture Global would have had a much better move. It had a little bit of a pop, but not significant enough. LNG, on the other hand, looks better to me.

Right now, LNG has had a nice run.

This has been around a long time, $52 billion market cap versus VG’s $37.92 billion market cap. And again this market cap is pretty constant here. This is a pretty solid pattern here for we’re going to look at the five year chart here. That’s a healthy looking chart for Cheniere. Now certainly like the LNG space, certainly like Cheniere, I think it’s a buy here as opposed to VG.

Neither one of them pay much of a dividend. It’s not even worth talking about. But revenue here for Cheniere is $16.74 billion trailing 12 months.

Profit margin 18.5%.

It’s got a quarterly revenue growth of 31% year over year.

So it’s in good shape. The cash to debt is fine. It’s again, like, not unlike Venture. It’s got a lot of debt on its balance sheet. But like Venture, it’s certainly got plenty of cash flow to service that debt.

Silly dividend.

It’s not even worth talking about. It’s so low. It’s less than a percent, about 0.85%. So nothing much to speak of there.

But I just like the pattern of the stock. And over time, it’s done much better. Over the one year pattern, it’s done better than VG. So when it comes to LNG plays, buy LNG and not VG.

But there will come a time for VG, and I’ll let you know when that is. Cheers, everybody. Thanks for being with me. Catch you guys next week.

Cheers.