The proof is in Murphy and its 1,733 stations spread across the southern half of the United States. The group, which claims to be a grocer as much as a fuel distributor, serves a clientele that is the exact opposite of Nvidia's - popular and precarious, which it describes as "living paycheck to paycheck".
This assertive strategy, coupled with the Murphy Drive Rewards loyalty program, enables Murphy to increase the average customer basket in the grocery segment year after year. The mirror effect of this dynamic is a fuel price that continues to evolve at very attractive levels.
This attractiveness attracts more and more customers, who then store in the grocery segment. Over the last decade, sales have grown by just 2.6% a year, while operating profit has risen by 9.5% a year.
It's not just in terms of operations that Murphy stands out from its peers, but also in terms of management. In addition to profit growth, half of the company's free cash flow generated over the last decade has gone into share buy-backs. In this respect, Murphy is an authentic "cannibal", withdrawing between 6% and 8% of its outstanding shares each year at an average valuation of x14 profits.
The combination of these two features - rising operating profit, massive share buybacks at attractive valuation levels - has enabled Murphy's shareholders to achieve an investment performance x3.5 higher than that of the SP500 over the last decade, which was exceptional for the index, and for the share price to increase sixfold over the last five years.
The situation deserves to be closely monitored, as Murphy's valuation is clearly ping-ponging between a ceiling of x20 earnings - which it reached again recently - and a floor of x10 earnings, which it has touched four times in ten years.