BP has appointed Woodside Energy boss Meg O’Neill as its next CEO, reinforcing the British oil giant’s back-to-basics strategy.

O’Neill will replace Murray Auchincloss, after less than two years in the role.

Auchincloss will step down today, with Carol Howle, BP’s executive vice president for supply, trading and shipping set to serve as interim CEO until O’Neill takes over the role on April 1. She will be BP’s fourth CEO in six years.

Stephen Isaacs, strategic advisor at Alvine Capital, which holds a position in BP, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday that while BP has been “a very poor performer for a long, long time,” this move could be “the last piece of the jigsaw” in getting its house in order.

“It rather kind of drank a bit too much Kool Aid on the whole energy transition and neglected its core businesses … So I think [the replacement of the CEO is] a kind of confirmation that we’re going to get back to basics. And I think that’s pretty good for the stock,” Isaacs said.

BP’s share price ended the previous session up 0.7% following the news. It initially extended gains into Thursday before moving into negative territory. Shares were last seen 0.1% lower.

Auchincloss stepped up from his previous role as chief financial officer to the top job in January 2024, after his predecessor Bernard Looney left the company for failing to disclose a relationship with a colleague.

Looney, who had been in the role since early 2020 when he succeeded Bob Dudley, had sought to transform the oil major into a green energy giant but came under investor pressure amid share underperformance.

Auchincloss reversed that strategy, and focused on the company’s core gas and oil units.

In the Wednesday statement, Auchincloss said he’d told recently appointed Chair Albert Manifold he was open to stepping down if an “appropriate leader” was identified.

BP fielded off takeover rumors earlier this year, with fellow U.K. energy incumbent Shell denying reports that it was in talks to snap up its its struggling competitor.

The London-listed oil exploration company that was founded in 1909 under the name Anglo-Persian Oil Company, has underperformed compared with its peers, having reported declining annual profits in both 2023 and 2024.

However, BP’s fundamental strategic reset that saw it U-turn on green pledges, shake-up its leadership, launch a cost-cutting program and a string of oil discoveries, helped ease pressure.

BP’s share price is up over 15% year-to-date and 21% over the past five years. The stock ended Wednesday up 0.7% as investors responded to the leadership announcement.

O’Neill will likely hold the line, drawing on more than two-and-a-half decades of experience in the oil and gas industry, including 23 yeas at U.S. giant ExxonMobil. She chairs the Australian oil and gas industry body Australian Energy Producers (AEP) and is a board member of the American Petroleum Institute. She also served on the board of the Business Council of Australia.

Speaking to CNBC’s Dan Murphy at the Future Investment Initiative Institute in Saudi Arabia in October about Woodside Energy’s strategy, O’Neill said that the firm’s investments are made by looking at the demand profile “for decades to come” — which led it to liquified natural gas (LNG).

Oil majors, including BP, have pushed hard into LNG production, which is considered a bridge fuel by the likes of the European Commission, given it is cleaner than coal.

“We’ve got deep conviction around the role of LNG as in many ways, finding the sweet spot between reliability, affordability and sustainability. When we talk to customers in places like North Asia and Europe and ask them what they want, they say ‘we want all three factors’,” she said.

When customers are asked whether they are willing to pay for more climate-friendly products, “the answer is often zero or near zero,” she added. “So that has underpinned our focus on LNG.”

At the time, Woodside expected LNG demand to grow 50% over the coming decade.

Isaacs tips “natural energy” stocks to rebound from recent damp investor sentiment. “They’re relatively cheap compared to the rest of the market, and they go with my general thesis of rotation — rotation out of tech into value,” he said.

Woodside Energy’s stock price closed Wednesday’s session 1.3% lower.

Coinbase is making its biggest push yet to reposition itself as a mainstream trading and financial platform, moving beyond crypto and into the broader retail investing stack as competitors show there’s real money in always-on engagement products.

The digital asset exchange announced Wednesday that it’s rolling out a major slate of new products designed to turn Coinbase into a one-stop financial app, expanding into stocks, more advanced trading, and prediction markets, while doubling down on its on-chain ecosystem and new tools for businesses, developers, and automated financial guidance.

While many of these offerings have been telegraphed for months, Coinbase says the products are now built, and ready to go.

CEO Brian Armstrong is looking to make his platform the place to trade everything.

That includes stocks, a streamlined futures and perpetuals experience, and prediction markets through Kalshi, alongside a tokenization roadmap aimed at eventually bringing more traditional assets on-chain, including equities.

The area of prediction markets, in particular, is quickly getting crowded.

DraftKings has moved to buy its own exchange, FanDuel is teaming up with CME, and Polymarket is entering the U.S. through a newly approved venue. Robinhood, meanwhile, is putting LedgerX at the center of its regulated push.

The defining rivalry in the space remains Kalshi versus Polymarket, regulated rails versus crypto-native liquidity.

Armstrong said the category’s appeal isn’t just trading, but its insight into sentiment, and what people think will happen next on any given topic.

“If you look at things like economic indicators … or elections, people are using prediction markets to try to figure out what is going to happen next month,” Armstrong told CNBC. “Maybe1% of people use it as an asset class to trade, and 99% of people are using it as a way to figure out what’s going to happen — almost like a competitor to traditional media or maybe even entertainment.”

In the company’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts in October, Armstrong showed just how easily prediction market wagers can be manipulated, rattling off several words that were being bet on.

“I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call,” Armstrong said. “And I just want to add here the words bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain, staking and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call.”

Robinhood underscored that shift this week by expanding prediction markets into sports-style contracts that resemble parlays and prop bets, and by touting the category as its fastest-growing business by revenue.

Coinbase is now bringing the same kind of outcome trading into its own ecosystem, but as a part of a much wider bet that the next-generation brokerage is a single app that blends traditional assets, derivatives, and on-chain rails.

Coinbase is pairing the trading expansion with a tokenization roadmap that signals where it wants the platform to go next, bringing more traditional assets on-chain, including equities.

The company is launching Coinbase Tokenize, an institutional stack intended to support real-world asset tokenization.

Armstrong framed the expansion as a bridge to something bigger.

Trading stocks, he said, is “a good first step,” but the real goal is tokenized equities. If Coinbase can get tokenized equity live, he said, it could “democratize access for people over the world,” and unlock new market structure in the U.S., including more robust, professional futures markets tied to equities.

“So this is the starting point,” he said.

The announcement also extends Coinbase’s push to become a provider of on-chain liquidity — not just a venue for listed tokens.

For businesses and developers, Coinbase is widening its platform story beyond retail trading. The company said Coinbase Business is becoming available to eligible customers in the U.S. and Singapore, and it’s rolling out an expanded API suite spanning custody, payments, trading, and stablecoins.

Armstrong’s broader thesis is that crypto isn’t a niche category, it’s an upgrade cycle for the financial system itself.

“Crypto is updating all financial services,” he said, suggesting that every major asset class will move on-chain over time, from prediction markets and equities to commodities, and eventually real-world assets like real estate.

Even the largest asset managers, he said, are signaling they want to migrate funds on-chain, positioning Coinbase as a central platform for that transition.

Coinbase is also introducing “custom stablecoins” for companies that want branded stablecoin rails, and spotlighting x402, a payments standard the company says is meant to make stablecoin payments easier to attach to web requests — including for automated commerce and agent-driven transactions.

The strategic throughline is retention and diversification.

Coinbase already owns a large crypto-native audience, and it wants that customer to stay on its platform for every asset class, even when crypto volumes cool and transaction revenue compresses.

WATCH: What to know about Robinhood’s new prediction market features