There’s little more than three months left in 2021. And time is rapidly running out for energy-light investors and their advisors to catch up to the sizzling performance of oil and gas stocks.

The S&P 500 Energy Index has returned better than 31 percent year to date, or nearly 12 percentage points more than the S&P 500 as a whole. And oil and gas stocks are even further ahead of the companies conventional wisdom says will replace them: The Invesco Solar ETF (NYSE: TAN) is underwater by -18 percent year-to-date, while the ARK Innovation ETF (NYSE: ARKK) is lower by more than -5 percent.

Benchmark North American oil prices are back over $70 per barrel. That’s a level few outside of our Energy and Income Advisor investment community expected at the beginning of 2021. Natural gas, meanwhile, has pushed to its highest price since December 2018, well over $4 per million British Thermal Units.

Energy stocks, however, remain largely unloved. In fact, the S&P Energy Index is still 11 percent below its late June high, before the combination of profit-taking, concerns about a new coronavirus wave and OPEC+ output increases took the wind out of its sails.

Energy stocks’ underperformance of the commodities demonstrates once again the lack of investor conviction in the staying power of the sector rally that began in early November 2020. In fact, the S&P Energy Index currently trades almost 20 percent lower than it did in early January 2020 prior to pandemic, when benchmark oil sold for $10 a barrel less than it does now and gas was almost $2 lower.

Rumors of an Iran nuclear deal dominated energy headlines this week. That’s hardly surprising. Nor is the selling it spurred of oil and energy stocks. But as we’ve pointed out, even if that country’s oil does return to world markets, it would have little real impact on the global supply and demand balance–especially at a time when US shale producers are staying conservative and post-pandemic demand is surging.

That’s why the more important news by far for US energy investors was a ruling by a federal judge in Louisiana, which blocked the Biden Administration’s “pause” on issuing new oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands.