Idle Rambling -- No Reason To Read This

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. 

Three interesting data points ahead of Janet Yellen's first meeting:

• the stock market managed to eke out a slight gain today, and "eke out" is the operative phrase
• WTI futures were trading just above $100 until the close, when the price settled at $99.95
• there are 196 rigs actively drilling in North Dakota today

Whether the rigs are FlexRigs, conventional rigs, work-over rigs, or drilling salt water disposal rigs, they all represent work and tangible resources.

This $100-oil-streak is the longest sustained streak of "high price oil" -- ever. It's a lot easier to live with stability, even with high prices, than volatility, and at the end of the day, $100-oil seems about right. 

How did some of the NYSE companies do today? This is the one I'm most interested in today -- McDonald's. I thought I saw a headline that said sales were still slipping. Yes, here it is: "sales chilled by January weather." LOL. December was the unexpectedly cold month; January was pretty normal. Oasis, in the Bakken, said it was a normal winter -- I love it when a company doesn't offer excuses, but just gets on with their work. Apparently McDonald's competitors didn't have the same trouble with the weather. Yahoo!Finance is reporting:

In hopes of attracting more diners, McDonald's has been aggressively promoting its revamped Dollar Menu, which includes new burgers that cost more than a dollar. 

Hellloooo! Could that be one of the problems .... "revamping the Dollar Menu which includes new burgers that cost more than a dollar"? [No, I don't invest in McDonald's -- never have, never will; I grew up with McDonald's; always curious to see how they are doing; I have to agree that their menu is way to complicated. In 'N Out, by contrast, has two hamburger choices, one French Fry choice, and a drink, and that's it. Pretty simple.

Other news from the financial world:

The Wall Street Transcipt requires a subscription (which I don't have) but one can always glean something from the teaser, and this one paragraph says what many others are saying:

I think we are seeing two themes which will impact offshore spend in 2014. The first is a decision by some of the major IOCs to try and rein in capex in order to improve their free cash flow. The second shift seems to be that at least some of the major oil companies have shifted their capex focus more onshore than the offshore in order to take advantage of North American shale opportunities.

What is WBR&C doing? Bloomberg is reporting:

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. plans $5 billion in capital investment at BNSF Railway Co. this year, positioning the carrier to extend a lead in spending over its biggest rival.

The budget marks an increase of about 25 percent from the target set a year earlier, Fort Worth, Texas-based BNSF said yesterday in a statement. BNSF’s program includes $2.3 billion for its rail network and $1.6 billion for equipment, including locomotives and railcars.

Buffett’s railroad outspent Union Pacific Corp. (UNP), its direct competitor in the western U.S., by about $700 million in 2013, a gap that may widen. With a boost from hauling crude oil, cargo shipments at BNSF rose about 4.5 percent last year compared with a 0.3 percent decline for Union Pacific, according to estimates by Jason Seidl, a New York-based analyst with Cowen & Co.

That's an interesting bit of trivia -- BNSF is based in Fort Worth. We live in Tarrant County; Fort Worth is the county seat for Tarrant County. Tonight on the news according to my wife (I don't watch television except, rarely, for sports), according to new census figures, Tarrant County currently is #1 in the entire United States for the number of folks moving into the county (if that makes sense). The #1 county out of which folks are moving is Los Angeles County. Three families a day, according to the news, according to my wife, are moving into Tarrant County -- three families a day. Obviously they are not all coming from Los Angeles.

I can't help but think that Ft Worth-based BNSF isn't part of the big picture in US mobility. Maybe it's a stretch. I don't care. I'm enjoying Slim Dusty on iTunes in the background waiting for our older granddaughter to finish her swimming lessons.

By the way, back to the BNSF story above. I wrote the following on February 6, 2014:

I say all this because we have no idea what BNI would have done during this same time period, but one can probably use UNP as a proxy for BNI. My hunch is that with the demise of coal and a relatively bad economy, UNP has not done as well as BNI, since the latter pretty much has a monopoly on track in the Bakken.

Wow! Pretty good, huh. Compare that with the story above:

With a boost from hauling crude oil, cargo shipments at BNSF rose about 4.5 percent last year compared with a 0.3 percent decline for Union Pacific, according to estimates by Jason Seidl, a New York-based analyst with Cowen & Co.

With that, gotta go. Maybe later tonight.