The hook behind Karim Rahemtulla’s “Ultimate Stock Unicorn” pitch is a big, specific claim. Out of 23,281 publicly traded companies, the presentation argues, only one is both wildly profitable and insanely undervalued, and that one has the President’s public backing plus a multi-year partnership with the hottest AI stock on Wall Street. The reveal, once you chase down the clues, is APA Corporation (APA), the company that traded for decades under the name Apache.
APA is not some obscure shell. It is one of the largest independent oil and gas producers in the United States, with a portfolio that reaches from the Permian Basin and the Delaware Basin in West Texas and New Mexico across to Egypt, the UK North Sea, and offshore Suriname. The numbers the promo leans on are real, even if several of them are frozen in time. The company sits on roughly 3.7 million gross acres, operates nearly 5,000 wells, and produces on the order of 143,000 barrels of oil per day alongside around 467 million cubic feet of natural gas daily. That is a substantial, diversified production base, and the kind of asset footprint that makes a “unicorn” story worth reading.
The company behind the ticker
APA Corporation took its current name in 2021, when the old Apache rebranded and reorganized its structure. The name change was mostly cosmetic; the assets, the acreage, and the operating history all carried forward. What matters for investors is how the business generates cash. APA is an exploration and production company, which means it earns money the old-fashioned way: it drills wells, lifts hydrocarbons, and sells them at whatever the market pays. That is a straightforward model, and it is exactly why the promo can point to hard numbers like operating income above $3 billion and revenue growth above 15%.
The international footprint is worth a mention because it changes the risk profile. Egypt is a long-standing core area for APA and throws off meaningful cash flow. The North Sea is a mature, declining basin. Suriname is the wildcard: APA and its partners made one of the largest offshore discoveries of the past decade there, and that asset has the potential to reshape the company’s future, though it also carries the cost and execution risk of a major deepwater development. None of that complexity makes it into the ad copy, which prefers a cleaner story.
What the promo claims
The pitch stacks three financial claims on top of the acreage story. Operating income of over $3 billion. Revenue growth of more than 15%. Dividend growth of more than 20% through the last three years. All three read as a picture of a company compounding steadily, and all three deserve a second look.
The first two are directionally reasonable, but they date from an earlier reporting window rather than the current one. The third, the dividend claim, is the one that does not hold up. APA cut its dividend to essentially nothing during the 2020 oil-price collapse, then rebuilt it over the following years. A payout restored from near zero can produce an almost arbitrarily large percentage gain without representing real, steady growth. Today the dividend sits at 25 cents per quarter, which is the same level the company paid in 2019. That is a recovery, not a growth story, and calling it “20% growth through the last three years” overstates what actually happened.
The signals that are real
To be fair to the promo, a few of its hooks check out. The “multi-year partnership with the hottest AI stock on Wall Street” is a reference to APA’s deal with Palantir, which provides software to optimize energy production. That relationship is real and concrete, not vaporware. And the “President publicly backed it” line, while a stretch, traces to a real event: then-President Trump objected to a proposed UK windfall tax that would have hit APA’s North Sea production. It is a politician defending domestic operators from a specific tax, not an endorsement of the stock, but it is not fabricated.
The value-investor angle is also legitimate. Bill Nygren’s Oakmark funds hold roughly 8.2 million shares of APA, and the “nearly doubled his stake” description is a fair read of that position. When a respected value manager builds a position in an out-of-favor energy name, it is a signal worth paying attention to, and it is one of the claims the presentation gets right.
The stale math is the real problem
Here is where the pitch breaks down, and it is the single most important thing to understand about this promo. The campaign’s tease price of $16.71 dates from April 2025. The stock now trades near $50.79, which means APA has already more than tripled since the ad was written. The “insanely undervalued” framing is retrospective: it describes a stock that was cheap eighteen months ago, not one that is about to be discovered today. The “market cap under $8 billion” line is off by more than a factor of two, because the current market cap is closer to $17.8 billion.
Set the ad copy aside and APA still has a defensible case on its own merits. At the current price it trades at roughly four to six times earnings and carries a dividend yield above 6%. Those are real, checkable numbers that hold up today, and they are the quieter, more honest version of the thesis. We walk through that valuation math, and how the dividend actually behaves, in our oil dividend stocks explainer, and we put the whole energy sector in context in our energy stocks piece. The royalty alternative to owning producers directly is a different question entirely, one we cover in our look at oil and gas royalties.
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