Early Morning Trading -- Slow News Day -- For Investors Only

Investing talk. 

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

Jobs report status quo. My hunch is the weekly initial unemployment claims will now remain in a narrow range. The monthly unemployment number will continue to improve, though it won't mean much. Things are in a holding pattern right now. "Everyone" has baked ObamaCare into the stock market ... and guess what: the President, by executive order, has put the whole program on hold. Technically and legally NOT the WHOLE program but the word on the street is that the program is on hold. Do you remember the movie, Waiting For Guffman? Life follows art; now it's "waiting for Obamacare." This is what we will get:

• insurers will get a huge bailout
• 2015 premiums will skyrocket; government will step in; cap premiums
• folks will finally understand what "deductibles" mean
• urgent care clinics will flourish; hospitals will struggle
• insurers will be pass-through entities for Obamacare; regulated; same as federal crop insurance
• federally-mandated 30-hour work week will be the biggest single cultural change 
• massive civil disobedience as folks don't sign up for ObamaCare (it's the law of the land)
• employers have been given the green light to cost-shift health care expenses to employees
• cost-shifting will be the headline story when unions, NLRB gets involved
• all the current talk about the minimum wage is a spin-off from Obamacare reality

For investors, Obamacare will be a godsend. I think folks forget how this all started. It was demagoguery that got it passed; it was passed on the premise that 30 million Americans are uninsured for health care.

The dirty little secret was this: employers -- BIG BUSINESS -- knew they were going to go broke because of health care expenses. I saw it in the military: the general officers were the first to see it but they couldn't stop it. TRICARE was a bigger operation than flying in the US Air Force by the time I retired. Conscientious municipal financial officers saw it coming, but mayors and governors didn't want to "touch it." Hillary was pragmatic; she knew it. She had business experience (cattle futures, if nothing else) and she listened to BIG BUSINESS that was supporting her financially. BIG BUSINESS needed to do something. Health care costs had two liabilities:  a) increasing exponentially; and, b) increasing capriciously. It was bad enough that Blue Cross Blue Shield premiums increased 20% every October for the next year's coverage, but not being able to plan was the most difficult.

BIG BUSINESS can handle 20% increases in any expense year after year if the playing field is even (everybody incurs the 20% increase) and if it is predictable: they simply bake it into their numbers and pass the increased cost unto their customers.

It was unpredictably that was the killer. Hillary listened. She was the first to succeed at making this her entire campaign. And she almost won. Until a better orator came along.

The genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Obamacare is a win-win for everyone. The consumers got two things: no pre-existing conditions clauses (smoke all you want, gain all the weight you want, you won't be penalized); and, no annual cap on medical expenses. BIG BUSINESS got two things: predictably and the green-light to cost shift their employees.

Everything else is marginal. Everything else will be sorted out in the US Congress and in state legislatures. But with consumers getting no pre-existing-condition clauses and no annual/lifetime caps; and BIG BUSINESS getting out of the health insurance business, Obamacare, by another name, is not going to go away.

And now that it's on hold, the market can only go one way. Companies will start reporting falling health expenses this year. My hunch is there will be no headlines reporting that. It will be hard to find. In fact, the health care expense line in financial reports will simply and silently disappear, except for the $200/month/employee subsidy that employers will provide their employees to find their own health insurance. And employers will be very resistant to raising that amount, just as they are very, very (ostensibly) resistant to raising the minimum wage. (I say ostensibly because I don't think BIG BUSINESS is all that resistant to increasing the minimum wage -- maybe a separate blog on that in the future, why BIG BUSINESS probably favors an increase in the minimum wage. Spoiler alert: think Darwinian).

Yesterday, I wrote Don, that TESLA surging in after-hours was a huge plus for the market. It has nothing to do with TESLA, per se. But a lot of retail investors are sitting on the side line watching the market recover from the January slump and missing out. Even conservative investors have missed out on MDU -- hitting new highs almost every day for the past couple of weeks.

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

Oil is flat today. Taking a breather. Not much news, I suppose, but that doesn't mean the oil and gas companies are flat. TPLM up a bit, but AMZG is up almost 4%. WMB is up over 3%.

WMB: beats by a whole penny and the shares go wild, up 3%. Gotta love it. Earnings were actually down this year compared to last year. By a pretty healthy amount.

That's the problem with the market for some folks. It doesn't make sense. All things being equal, it comes down to perception, sentiment, fear, greed, I suppose.

Must be the start of summer here in the DFW area. I see the mowers alongside the interstate and state highways. Drives my allergies wild.