We recently published a list of Billionaire Rob Citrone’s 10 Small-Cap Stock Picks with Huge Upside Potential. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Vista Energy, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:VIST) stands against Billionaire Rob Citrone’s other small-cap stock picks with huge upside potential.
Rob Citrone founded Discovery Capital Management in 1999. Based in Connecticut, Discovery Capital is one of the Tiger Cub hedge funds. Rob Citrone worked as a portfolio manager at Fidelity Investments and Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management before founding Discovery Capital. Citrone was also a wrestler in high school and today owns a small slice of his favorite football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. His firm focuses on liquidity, valuation multiples, past and potential growth in picking stocks, and has a focus on technology, services, basic materials, and financial sectors. The last reported 13F filing for Q4 2024 included $1.47 billion in managed 13F securities and a top 10 holdings concentration of 44.09%.
Robert Citrone recently cut his long equity portfolio. In his January monthly letter, obtained by the Institutional Investor, the firm halved its net equity exposure to 25% from a peak of 50% just at year-end to go flat to short in developed markets. He has been expecting a stock market correction of 5% to 7%. He believes it is meaningful enough to reduce risk and potentially be short, even though it’s not a large sell-off. Citrone thinks the market is expensive in historical terms, especially relative to interest rates. Still, the majority of global investors are long corporate America, including venture, private equity, private credit, long-only equity, and/or credit long-short hedge funds, even as the US enters tariff uncertainty and no more Fed cuts are anticipated in the near term.
Our Methodology
To compile the list of billionaire Rob Citrone’s 10 small-cap stock picks with huge upside potential, we sifted through the Q4 2024 13F filings of Discovery Capital Management from Insider Monkey. From these filings, we checked the upside potential from CNN for the top 50 stock picks that were trading between $1 billion and $10 billion and ranked the stocks in ascending order of this upside potential. We have also added Discovery Capital Management’s stake in each company and the hedge fund sentiment around each stock.
Note: All data was sourced on May 8.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
A drilling rig pumping oil and gas from a well in Latin America.
Vista Energy, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:VIST)
Discovery Capital Management’s Stake: $71.46 million
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 18
Market Capitalization as of May 8: $4.43 billion
Average Upside Potential as of May 8: 44.10%
Vista Energy, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:VIST) explores and produces oil & gas in Latin America. The company’s principal assets are located in the Neuquina basin, Argentina, and Vaca Muerta. It owns producing assets in Argentina and Mexico. In addition, it’s involved in drilling and workover activities located in Argentina.
The company’s Upstream Oil & Gas Production in the Vaca Muerta shale play drives Vista’s growth, which is also amplified by the acquisition of Petronas Argentina. In Q1 2025, Vista produced 80,900 BOE/d, which was up 47% year-over-year. Oil production specifically reached 69,600 barrels per day, which was also up 47%. This production growth directly fueled a 38% year-over-year increase in total revenues for the quarter, which reached $438 million.
This acquisition of Petronas Argentina also includes oil midstream capacity, which adds 57,000 barrels per day of contracted pipeline capacity. This brings the company’s pro forma total oil pipeline capacity to ~200,000 barrels per day. Vista Energy S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:VIST) is currently working on a revised 2025 plan to incorporate this acquisition.
Overall, VIST ranks 4th on our list of Billionaire Rob Citrone’s small-cap stock picks with huge upside potential. While we acknowledge the growth potential of VIST, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold great promise for delivering high returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than VIST but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
