This oil giant has lagged its leading rivals through two energy crises. Now one Wall Street giant says it’s time to buy.

BP has trailed its closest integrated-oil peers over the past three to five years, a stretch spanning both the pandemic-driven demand collapse and the energy-price surge that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Now a leading Wall Street firm has turned positive on the shares, arguing the underperformance has created an opening.

The call matters less as a signal to act than as a window into how analysts are framing value in the integrated majors. Relative laggards can close the gap if operational execution improves, cost discipline holds, and capital returns stay intact through a softer price environment. The same traits that made BP a laggard — its mix of oil, gas, refining, and low-carbon spending — also shape how it responds to the next swing in crude.

What to watch: upcoming quarterly results, any change to buyback or dividend plans, progress on the low-carbon strategy, and whether peers revise their own outlooks. Those disclosures, not a single rating change, will test whether the gap genuinely narrows.