Tuesday: Apple -- What A Great Entry Point; The Back Story To That Drying Lake In California -- Worthy Of A Mark Twain Short Story -- The Fish That Doesn't Return

Active rigs:

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RBN Energy: processing gulf coast condensate.

Four midstream companies are building or planning condensate splitter capacity to process at least 400 Mb/d of Eagle Ford production by 2016.  These facilities will join BASF/Total, who have been operating a 75 Mb/d splitter at Port Arthur since 2000. Gulf Coast refiners are also increasing their capacity to process lighter crudes. These infrastructure developments are being made in response to a flood of condensate range material coming out of the Eagle Ford into Houston and Corpus Christi.  Today we detail these plans.

The Wall Street Journal

There will be a lot of stories about Apple today, I assume. I've read the transcript. Again, it's an incredibly financial and operations story. Apple is going to be around a long, long time. Pay attention to record sales, record profits, and record margins. 

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read here or think you might have read here. For the record, I have never owned AAPL shares, never have, never will.

Yes, and here it is, the top story in "Marketplace": Apple iPhone sales, outlook come up short. I think the company learned a lot from the iPhone 5c failure. Thank goodness. "Heard on the Street" takes another look.

Apple may have disappointed investors late Monday. But the company's quarterly results and guidance simply drove home the point that it remains dedicated to preserving the bottom line, even at the expense of sales.

This was particularly so with the iPhone. Apple shipped 51 million of these in its first fiscal quarter ended Dec. 28. This represented a gain of only 6.7% year over year, and fell short of Wall Street's expectation of about 55 million. The miss was compounded by the fact it came in a period that saw the launch of two new models and the inclusion of two carriers in China in that launch.

However, Apple is holding the line on pricing: the average selling price on the iPhone rose by more than 10% from the previous quarter. That is a much bigger jump than what has been seen in the comparable periods during the last two fiscal years. Apple's guidance also indicates that it will keep to this path, with the company predicting relatively flat revenue and a gross margin for the current quarter of 37% to 38%, in line with Wall Street's forecast.

This is a strange bit of trivia: ethanol exporters look for a port.

U.S. ethanol makers are banking on export markets as they grapple with Obama administration plans to cut U.S. consumption requirements, but the industry is hampered by a distribution structure built almost exclusively around the domestic market.

Archer Daniels Midland Co., Green Plains Renewable Energy Inc., and other ethanol producers are trying to boost sales to Brazil, Mexico, Asia and the Middle East, in part by cutting costs to make the corn-based biofuel more price-competitive overseas.

Exports could reach one billion gallons this year, increasing their share of U.S. output to 7% from 5%, as lower corn prices help producers sell ethanol more cheaply to foreign buyers, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group.

But the $44 billion industry's efforts to expand could be limited, analysts say, because the bulk of U.S. ethanol plants are located in the Midwest to be close to the corn supply rather than near shipping ports. That is driving up costs to transport the fuel.

US Honda hits milestone: more Hondas were manufactured in the US than imported from Japan. Honda actually exported 108,000 vehicles FROM the US.

Wow, this is surprising. A UNANIMOUS Supreme Court ruled that employers are not required to pay workers for the time it takes to put on safety gear. Why do I find myself supporting the employees on this one? There must be more to the story.

The Los Angeles Times

A fascinating story on the plague. Yes, that plague. It turns out that the Justinian plague was of different genetic stock than the others.

After dispatching so many souls in eight-to-12-year cycles with such efficiency, what became of that novel strain? For now, the authors can only conjecture that either human populations evolved to become less susceptible to its deadly ways or that climatic changes taking place at the time created a less hospitable environment for the Justinian Plague pathogen.

Evidence for the latter possibility includes the fact that all three plagues -- the Justinian Plague, the Black Plague and the plague that surged in the late 1800s and early 1900s -- followed periods of exceptional rainfall and ended periods of climatic stability.

Now, isn't that more interesting than last year's presidential state of the union address?

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Great photo of Cachuma Lake in central California drying up. Think fracking, water.

Later, after posting the photo of Lake Cachuma, a reader sent me the following e-mail:

This lake is in my backyard as I am only 15 miles from it in the Santa Ynez Valley.

It is true the lake is running very low, but the writer missed the why of the story ... and here is the why:

When the dam was built back in the 40's-50's (I haven't googled it but it's about that old) the farmers downstream in Lompoc some 30 miles away wanted to be sure that after the dam was built they would still get the same amount of water that flowed to them every year (every rainy year that is) that would be lost once the dam was built.

So for the past year, the dam at Cachuma Lake has been steadily releasing water in an amount that allows the water to make it all the way downstream to Lompoc.

There is a second side story about another more controversial required mandatory release of water that is really amazing - they must release water so that the endangered steelhead trout can make it upstream, even though a) these trout are on the endangered list with controversy as they may not be the same species; b) these fish haven't been seen in the river since the dam was built due to changing the natural pattern of the seasonal river, but even then there is only old fish stories of their historical presence; and, c) the dam actually blocks their path to the areas that they would be going to even if they tried to navigate the long river run.

It's an interesting story if you want to google it and see all of the theories on these fish. Nevertheless, the dam must release water not only for the farmers but also for the fish that never come.

Reminds me of the smelt in the Sacramento Delta and the trade off that humans endure to save every species and protect them from having to adapt to a changing environment (aka we are changing it - but that is what top predators have always done so are we not actually changing the process by trying to remain unchanged?)

By the way, the purpose of linking the photograph in the first place was to suggest to readers that with photographs like that, OXY and CVX are going to have a devil of a time fracking (with water) in the state of California.

The Boston Globe

A spike in fatal shootings pushes homicide rate to highest level "in quite some time." 

This is nice: an employer has ordered that his back office increase the pay for his employees. The is the CEO's first experience in business. Learning on the job. 

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I love this cold weather. It's 22 degrees in the Fort Worth, TX, suburbs. The women are all wearing very stylish winter clothes coming into Starbucks. Very stylish. Long, warm dresses; knee-high boots. Nice. The men: not much change. Some in their hunting parkas.