Friday; TVA To Close Eight (8) Coal-Fired Plants; Heinz To Lay Off 1,350; Calumet To Refine In San Antonio; Individual Mandate Delayed One Year -- Dems Asking For More

Active rigs: 185 (steady; higher than usual)

RBN Energy: Calumet is someone to watch; first a new refinery in Dickinson (North Dakota), now one in San Antonio. 

Owning a refinery in the middle of the fastest growing shale crude basin sounds like a good idea. Calumet Specialty Products LP thinks so – they purchased the 14.5 Mb/d San Antonio refinery in December 2012 located at the heart of the Eagle Ford. Since then Calumet has set about expanding production and organizing more efficient crude transportation. But owning such a small refinery near the largest refining region in the world has its risks. Today we describe how location and crude supply advantages help keep this refinery competitive.

 The Wall Street Journal

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on what you read here or what you think you may have read here. 

I think the biggest investment news story yesterday was the report that Warren Buffett bought 1% of ExxonMobil. There may be more to follow. In pre-market trading, XOM is already up by almost 2%. Motley Fool weighs in on why Warren bought XOM: cheap, second largest company in the world (market cap), and longevity. Those are hardly reasons, except "cheap." These "reasons" only explain Buffett's strategies and constraints; it provides no insight for the average retail investor. And, if anything, he's late. XOM was probably trading in the high 80's when he bought it; in July, 2010, he could have gotten it for less than $55/share (which many did). That was only a couple of years ago, so we're not talking about a decade-old story.

Was the word "speculators" used in this article? I guess it's not "speculation" when Goldman Sachs does it. Of if they lose money. It's just a "wrong-way bet."

A wrong-way bet on global oil prices has hit some of the crude market's most high-profile investment firms, including hedge funds run by former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. traders, worsening what has been a dismal year for commodity-fund returns. Wagers that the gap between Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude-oil prices would narrow were upended when the "spread" between these two prices instead diverged during September and October. 

In blow to coal, TVA to shut eight (8) coal-burning units in Alabama and Kentucky. 

Yesterday it was announced that Lockheed Martin would cut 4,000 jobs; today the new owners of Heinz (which includes Warren Buffett) announces layoffs of 1,350.

Of course, the big story is President Obama delaying the individual mandate for a year.

Democratic lawmakers running for cover.

Insurers expressed a range of worries over "shift."

Insurers expressed a range of worries after President Barack Obama moved to placate millions of consumers by allowing insurers to offer plans next year that they were canceling under the health-care law.

Huge: West Virginia preps for shale-gas play.

A Brazilian conglomerate unveiled a proposal Thursday to build a multibillion-dollar natural-gas refining complex in West Virginia—the biggest such development in the state as it tries to profit from the region's drilling boom.

The proposed project by Odebrecht Group, a privately held São Paolo-based engineering, construction and petrochemical company, would include a plant known as an ethane cracker, where natural gas is turned into ethylene, a chemical-industry feedstock. It would also include three plants to produce polyethylene, which is used to make numerous products, from plastic bags to pipes.

This is an interesting story: boys more at risk than girls in womb. "We" talked about that all the time back "in the day." Although we didn't know why, and we didn't have the studies to back up our hunches, we always felt better when we learned that the baby was a girl if the baby was going to come early.

Humor For The Day

This was a front page headline in today's New York Times: "Health Law Rollout's Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush's Hurricane Response"

President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.

But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn. A contrite-sounding Mr. Obama repeatedly blamed himself on Thursday for the failed health care rollout, which he acknowledged had thrust difficult burdens on his political allies and hurt Americans’ trust in him.