Canadian Natural Resources: $10,000 became $10,315,796 tax-free in 25 years. 21% annual dividend growth for twenty five years!

The 1,000-Bagger Wall Street Blacklisted to Save the Planet: Why I'm Buying More

Most investors spend their days glued to stock tickers like teenagers monitoring their Instagram likes.

Warren Buffett, bless his Omaha soul, can’t be bothered.

He’s figured out something the rest of Wall Street seems constitutionally incapable of grasping: dividends are boring, which is precisely why they work.

Buffett spelled it out in his 2014 letter to Berkshire shareholders with all the subtlety of a divorce lawyer explaining alimony. Invest a thousand bucks in the S&P 500 back in 1964, sit on your hands for fifty years, and you’d have twenty-four grand.

Respectable, if you enjoy waiting half a century for what amounts to a decent used car.

But reinvest those dividends—actually use the cash to buy more shares instead of blowing it on avocado toast—and that same thousand balloons to $112,000.

That’s not a typo, it’s mathematics, which has the advantage of being true whether you believe in it or not.

Hartford Funds did the arithmetic: since 1960, dividends and reinvesting them account for 85% of the market’s total returns.

Which means stock prices themselves—the things everyone obsesses over—contribute about as much to your wealth as the participation trophy you got in Little League.

Read that again: 85% of long-term market returns come from dividends and reinvesting them. Not from watching CNBC. Not from timing entries and exits. From collecting cash and buying more shares—especially when prices are flat or falling. The investor who understands this beats the trader who doesn’t, every single time.

Buffett gets this.

Back in the late ‘80s, he dropped $1.3 billion on Coca-Cola stock. Today, Coke mails him $816 million annually—and they’ve increased that dividend every single year since he bought it, growing at 8% annually for 37 straight years.

It’s like buying a house once and having your tenants pay you back nearly two-thirds of the purchase price every single year, forever—with the rent going up 8%.

Try getting that deal from your rental property.

Now, Buffett likes companies that raise dividends steadily—5% to 8% annually. Solid, sensible, the investment equivalent of wearing a seatbelt.

But what if you found a company hiking dividends more than 20% every year for twenty-five consecutive years?

You’d assume it was either impossible or funded by Colombian pharmaceutical exports.

Yet this company exists.

It should be more famous than the Kardashians, except Wall Street maintains a silence so deafening you’d think someone discovered Jimmy Hoffa in the executive suite.

Why the hush?

Because this company produces oil, and today’s analysts would sooner attend a PETA barbecue than recommend energy stocks.

The fact that nearly a quarter of Berkshire’s holdings flow from fossil fuels doesn’t bother Buffett one bit.

Buffett actually owned Canadian oil sands—he bought Suncor in 2013. Held it for seven years, made solid returns. Then in 2020, when oil went negative and panic set in, Suncor slashed its dividend by 55%. Buffett sold. Not because he stopped believing in Canadian oil—he switched to Chevron and Occidental Petroleum immediately after. He was rejecting dividend cuts, not the sector. Meanwhile, CNQ kept paying. Kept raising. Kept compounding. The company that doesn’t flinch is the one you want to own.

While the Davos crowd sips fair-trade coffee and calculates the carbon offset for their Gulfstreams—right before scheduling next quarter’s helicopter tour of melting glaciers—Warren’s busy making money the old-fashioned way: by owning things that people actually need, like gasoline to escape from conferences about sustainability.

That unapologetically profitable company is Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ).

Wall Street won’t mention it at cocktail parties, but now you know.

The ESG Industrial Complex: How Virtue Became a Revenue Stream

Before we canonize CNQ, let’s address why you’ve never heard of it.

It’s not because the company’s hiding. It’s because an entire industry profits from pretending it doesn’t exist.

The ESG consulting business has become the most profitable grift since selling indulgences. Companies pay six-figure fees to consultants who rate them on metrics nobody can define, using methodologies nobody can verify, to satisfy mandates nobody asked for.

Tesla gets an ESG gold star despite Elon’s private jet emitting more carbon than a small nation. Meanwhile, a Canadian oil company with a 0% production decline rate and ruthless capital discipline gets blacklisted because it extracts the stuff that heats homes in February.

The logic is impeccable—if you’re a consultant billing hourly.

Major ESG funds charge 0.75% annually to underperform the market while lecturing pensioners about saving polar bears. The irony is thick enough to stop a tanker: these funds exclude energy stocks, the very companies that generated the capital to fund clean energy research in the first place.

Berkshire holds massive positions in Occidental Petroleum and Chevron. Nearly a quarter of Buffett’s portfolio flows from fossil fuels. He’s not losing sleep over it. But the Yale endowment proudly divested from energy companies, then watched those stocks outperform their ESG alternatives by double digits.

One group is accountable to returns. The other is accountable to people who’ll never check the results.

The Analyst’s Unspoken Dilemma: Career Suicide in Three Letters—C, N, Q

Here’s what Wall Street analysts won’t tell you over drinks, but will admit after the third bourbon:

“I know CNQ is a spectacular stock. I can’t recommend it.”

Why?

Because institutional machinery has created perverse incentives where being right costs you more than being wrong.

Recommend CNQ, and you trigger:

• Compliance flags on oil exposure

• ESG committee rejections

• Institutional client mandates that automatically exclude it

• Internal policies that punish “controversial” recommendations

Recommend a mediocre tech stock that fits the ESG profile, and nobody questions you. The stock underperforms? That’s just markets. Your career survives.

Recommend an oil stock that quintuples? You’re the guy who ignored climate risk. You’re called before the ESG committee. You’re explaining yourself to clients who’ve publicly committed to net-zero by 2050—a deadline conveniently after everyone currently employed will have retired.

The incentive structure doesn’t reward accuracy. It rewards conformity.

This is why fifty-three thousand publicly traded companies worldwide, exactly one—CNQ—has achieved 21% dividend growth for twenty-five consecutive years, yet you won’t find it on a single “Best Stocks for 2025” list.

It’s not that analysts don’t know. It’s that knowing doesn’t pay their mortgages.

The Compounding Catastrophe: What Excluding CNQ Cost Public Pensions

Let’s talk about who actually pays for this virtue signaling.

California teachers. New York sanitation workers. Illinois firefighters. Anyone whose pension fund decided fossil fuels were immoral.

CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, divested from oil and gas starting in 2015. Noble. Progressive. Expensive.

If they’d held CNQ from 2000 to 2025, a $100 million position would be worth over $1 billion today. Instead, they allocated to ESG-compliant alternatives that delivered fractions of those returns.

The difference doesn’t come out of the fund managers’ pockets. It comes out of retirees’ checks.

The average California teacher retired with tens of thousands less because activists convinced pension trustees that generating returns was less important than generating headlines.

This isn’t activism. It’s malpractice with other people’s retirements.

New York State’s pension fund excluded energy stocks while energy outperformed the S&P 500 by over 40% in the last three years. That underperformance doesn’t get made up. It compounds—negatively—meaning future retirees either get smaller checks or current workers pay higher contributions.

But nobody’s protesting outside pension fund offices demanding better returns. They’re too busy applauding press releases about achieving net-zero in investment portfolios.

The laptop class at Davos doesn’t need pension income. The firefighter in Buffalo does.

Guess which one bore the cost of feel-good investment policies?

Dividend Kings Step Aside, There’s a New Saint in Town

Wall Street adores its aristocracy.

First come the Dividend Aristocrats—companies raising dividends for twenty-five straight years. Reliable, respectable, about as exciting as oatmeal.

Above them sit the Dividend Kings, who’ve hiked dividends for fifty years. These are the bluebloods, the old money of the investment world, steady as a metronome and just as thrilling.

But even Kings stumble.

We’ve endured four apocalyptic market crashes in the last quarter-century: the Dot-Com implosion, the financial crisis, the oil crash, and whatever we’re calling the pandemic disaster this week.

Aristocrats froze dividends. Some Kings hit pause. Everyone got nervous.

Then came April 2020, when oil hit negative $37 a barrel.

Negative.

Sellers were paying buyers to take the stuff. Adam Smith wept. Storage tanks were full, demand had evaporated, and the invisible hand flipped everyone the bird.

For one glorious afternoon, oil traders were essentially reverse-panhandling: ‘Please, sir, take this barrel of West Texas Intermediate. Here’s forty bucks. I insist.’

Except one company didn’t flinch.

Calmly, quietly, it kept hiking dividends 21% annually for twenty-five consecutive years, treating market crashes with all the concern most people reserve for weather forecasts. Out of fifty-three thousand publicly traded companies worldwide, exactly one achieved this.

If that’s not a financial miracle, I don’t know what is.

Every religion requires saints, and CNQ qualifies.

Since they’re still operating out of Calgary and haven’t ascended to heaven yet, we’ll name our saint after Alberta’s legendary premier, Peter Lougheed—whose first name was actually Edgar. The man who famously told Ottawa to keep its bureaucratic mitts off Alberta’s oil.

A politician who actually defended taxpayers?

Miracles really do exist.

Saint Edgar of Alberta: patron saint of disciplined capital, guardian of dividends, protector of anyone smart enough to ignore cable news.

A Miraculous Recipe: Free Cash Flow and Discipline

How does CNQ pull off these miracles?

Relentless discipline, the kind that makes Trappist monks look impulsive.

In 2024, despite commodity markets behaving like drunken sailors, CNQ generated $5.9 billion in free cash flow.

Its break-even oil price sits at US$40-45 per barrel, meaning it profits even when the market’s having a nervous breakdown.

Operating costs?

Around US$15 per barrel, exceptionally low for oil sands production and lower than most people’s hourly wage.

And here’s what makes CNQ’s dividend growth sustainable:

Unlike conventional oil companies with 30-50% annual production decline rates, CNQ’s oil sands mining operations have a 0% decline rate. Build the mine once, and it produces steadily for decades.

It’s less oil drilling, more manufacturing.

Combined with their tiered capital allocation framework—which automatically increases shareholder returns as debt falls—the 21% dividend growth you’ve seen isn’t a fluke.

It’s engineered.

CNQ recently acquired Chevron’s Canadian assets for $6.5 billion, further cementing its position as the company even market crashes can’t rattle.

Its capital allocation discipline—returning all free cash flow to shareholders via dividends and buybacks—makes it practically saintly.

Or as close to saintly as anything involving tar sands can get.

The Alberta Advantage: What Happens When Politicians Don’t Apologize

Here’s what nobody in Brooklyn will admit: Alberta figured it out.

They built an energy industry that’s both profitable and progressively cleaner—through engineering, not legislation. Through innovation, not condemnation.

Compare jurisdictions:

Alberta vs. California energy policy:

• Alberta: Reliable grid, cheap power, technological innovation in extraction

• California: Rolling blackouts, highest electricity rates in the continental U.S., importing power from—wait for it—coal plants in neighboring states

Texas vs. New York:

• Texas: Energy independence, economic growth, companies relocating by the dozens

• New York: Blocking pipelines while importing natural gas from Pennsylvania, paying premium prices for the privilege

Alberta reduced emissions-per-barrel by 21% over two decades. They did it with technology—carbon capture, cogeneration, process efficiency—not by shutting down production and pretending the oil wouldn’t get extracted somewhere else with dirtier methods.

Meanwhile, Western activists celebrated when Canadian pipeline projects got canceled, forcing crude onto trains—which spill more often, emit more carbon, and cost more—because apparently emissions don’t count if they happen on railroad property.

The difference is governance philosophy:

Alberta bet on technological progress making energy cleaner while keeping it affordable. They were right.

California bet on making energy so expensive that people would use less. They succeeded—and businesses fled to Texas.

One approach assumes humans can innovate their way to solutions. The other assumes humans are the problem.

Guess which one produced Saint Edgar’s miracle?

THE DIVIDEND MIRACLE YOU’D BE A FOOL NOT TO OWN

Suppose you’d invested ten grand in CNQ through your Roth IRA on January 2, 2000, at age 45, then promptly forgot about it.

You’d have purchased 12,500 shares at CAD $1.20 on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Let dividends reinvest automatically, let four 2-for-1 stock splits multiply your shares.

Today you’re 70, ready to retire. You own 322,772 shares worth $10,315,796—completely tax-free. That’s not a misprint. That’s what happens when you choose wisely and let compounding do the heavy lifting while you’re busy living your life.

Financial types call a stock that turns $10,000 into a million a “100-bagger”—the Holy Grail of investing. This is a 1,000-bagger. If that doesn’t qualify as miraculous, nothing does.

Your dividend income in 2025? $762,550—76 times your original investment arriving as passive income. Every penny tax-free.

If CNQ’s 21% dividend growth continues, you’d collect $7.7 million in tax-free dividend income between 2026 and 2030 while your $10+ million nest egg sits untouched.

Let that sink in: All yours. Zero to the taxman.

Ignoring this opportunity is like discovering the Rosetta Stone and using it as a doorstop.

I’ve owned CNQ for five years. If I didn’t, I’d buy it today—the same fundamentals that drove 25 years of 21% dividend growth are still in place.

But Charlie, The Stock’s Been Flat for 18 Months

Fair objection. CNQ’s traded between $28 and $35 since early 2024. If you’re measuring success by price appreciation, you’re watching the wrong number.

Here’s what actually happened while the stock went “nowhere”:

If you bought 10,000 shares at $28 in January 2024—$280,000—and reinvested dividends:

• Today: 11,200 shares worth $358,400

• Your share count increased 12% while the stock went sideways

• Annual dividend income: $26,880

• That’s a 9.6% yield on your original cost—in 18 months

The flat price isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity.

CNQ generated $5.9 billion in free cash flow this year and returned every penny to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. The money didn’t stay in the stock price—it went into your account.

Twenty-five years of 21% dividend growth doesn’t stop because the stock chart looks boring. It continues precisely because the company refuses to chase growth for growth’s sake. They’re not trying to impress momentum traders. They’re engineering returns for dividend investors.

Price is what amateurs watch. Yield on cost is what compounds wealth.

When you reinvest dividends, flat prices become buying opportunities. You’re accumulating more shares at lower prices, which means higher future income from the same initial investment. That’s not dead money—that’s patient capital doing what patient capital does best.

The stock price will move when it moves. Your dividend income grows regardless.

That’s the entire point.

CNQ shareholders aren’t just investors; they’re believers, quietly accumulating wealth year after year while everyone else panics over headlines.

Next time markets tremble, CNQ investors might whisper a prayer:

“Safeguard our yields, guide our capital, protect our dividends from bear markets and cable news prophets peddling doom.”

Dividend Aristocrats, step aside.

Dividend Kings, take a bow.

There’s a new saint in town, and his name is CNQ.

Amen.

Pass those dividend checks.

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One caveat for U.S. investors: CNQ dividends face a 15% Canadian withholding tax outside retirement accounts. Hold them in any IRA or 401(k), and you dodge the withholding.

But put them in a Roth?

The taxman gets zero. You get richer.

Miracles do happen.

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About Charlie Garcia

“When someone turns $10,000 into $10.3 million over 25 years on one position, you don’t question it. You copy their homework.” — John B., Hedge Fund manager

“Garcia’s MarketWatch column is the only financial writing that makes me laugh while showing me how to protect my seven-figure portfolio. The dark humor, the contrarian analysis, the topics other columnists avoid—I have no idea how it clears editorial, but I’m grateful he does.” — Michelle B., Financial Advisor

“The Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t hand out medals to people who never worked for them. Except when they do. And when they do, you should probably listen to them.” — Colonel Frank M., USMC (Ret.)

“Garcia writes the way the best operators think: fast, clean, and three moves ahead of everyone else.” — Thomas W., Former Defense Analyst

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Here’s what I learned in the White House Situation Room and in markets:

The most expensive information is the kind you get too late.

The second most expensive is the kind everyone else already has.

Capital Mischief is seeing what’s coming and betting on it before CNBC figures it out.