For Investors Only: AAPL Surges Almost 1.6%, Up Over $9; Market Cap Significantly Exceeds That Of XOM

The price of oil is up about half a percent today. Interesting. Everybody says it should be coming down. Must be those speculators.

However, dynamic changes in natural gas are occurring. Bloomberg is reporting that natural gas production will exceed demand as the summer wears on, mitigating fears of a shortage next winter.  SRE is trading about a percent lower today.

Trading at 52-week highs: AAPL, TRN, UNP, WMB.

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Over at SeekingAlpha -- how do Halcon wells compare with wells completed by EOG, CLR?  A lot of good information; I may go back to this article later to update my posts on Halcon but something in this paragraph had me scratching my head:

One of the reasons for the improvement in the results year-over-year is that HK has recently gone to slickback fracking. Further, HK has managed to lower development costs at the same time it has been increasing results. HK says it is on track for a 5%-10% additional decrease in well costs by year-end 2014.

Slickback?

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AXAS remains on a tear; it's up another 2% today.

WMB is up over 1% today; options trading last week suggested it might happen.  Pays 3.5%.

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.

UNP: interesting article at Fortune with nice photograph:

In an old-guard industry with over 150 years of history, railroad companies like Union Pacific Corporation are embracing technology to promote fuel efficiency in the 21st century. The aim: to lower costs and cut fossil fuel gas emissions.

Union Pacific Railroad, the nation's largest railroad company, has over 8,000 locomotives and serves 23 states west of Chicago, IL, and New Orleans, LA.

Take the work of Michael Iden, the general director of car and locomotive engineering, as one way the industry is challenging itself to think creatively. Iden and a team of other engineers have developed Arrowedge over the last few years, a technology that is intended to make freight trains carrying containers stacked one on top of the other more aerodynamic and therefore more fuel efficient.

After building balsa wood models by hand, Iden took the project to Brigham Young University to tweak further with the help of graduate engineering students. There, they conducted wind tunnel testing for six months to try to perfect the design, which Union Pacific has patented. "The thing that it ultimately shook down into is the streamlined shape, which is kind of like a wedge," said Iden.

UNP announced a 2-1 stock split last week.

AAPL's surge is very, very interesting. Solidly above $600 again. Market cap for AAPL ($523B) now significantly higher than XOM ($434B).

Speaking of XOM: it's also in the green today, and though it is not at a new 52-week high, it is in the ballpark.

PSX, up over 1%, is also having a great day.

OAS: flat, slightly to the upside.

TPLM: up over 4%. This is quite remarkable. I wonder if it has anything to do with the recent series on TPLM. This is a link to one part in a series on TPLM. This particular essay looks at the wholly owned subsidiaries of Triangle Petroleum: TUSA (E&P); RockPile (services, fracking); and Caliber Midstream (gathering, transporting, and processing).

COP: 

• Argus raises its stock target price for ConocoPhillips (COP +1.2%) to $90 from $80, maintaining its Buy rating, as the firm believes COP has successfully differentiated itself from other large-cap peers (Briefing.com).
• COP is the largest independent pure-play E&P company in the world, it is increasingly levered to high-margin liquids production, and it has most of its proven reserves in low-risk, OECD countries, the firm says.

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Global Warming

Without question, one of the best essays on the global warming debate is by Nate Silver, in his 2012 book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't.

He devotes pages 370 - 411 in this 534-page book which includes almost 60 pages of notes backing up this narrative to Chapter 12: A Climate of Healthy Skepticism.

According to the book jacket, Nate Silver is a statistician, writer, and founder of The New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight.com. Silver also developed PECOTA, a system for forecasting baseball performance that was bought by Baseball Prospectus. He was named one of the world's 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine.

Chapter 12 on Global Warming has several sub-sections:

• the noise and the signal
• the greenhouse effect is here
• this isn't rocket science
• three types of climate skepticism
• a forecaster's critique of global warming forecasts
• all the climate scientists agree on some of the findings
• climate scientists are skeptical about computer models
• climate science and complexity
• beyond a cookbook approach to forecasting
• uncertainty in climate forecasts
• a note on the temperature record
• James Hansen's predictions
• the IPCC's 1990 predictions
• the lessons of "global cooling"
• a simple climate forecast
• an inconvenient truth about the temperature record
• yet another reason why estimating uncertainty is essential
• "we're in a street fight with these people"
• the difference between science and politics

In Chapter 8, Nate Silver, gets to the nut of his theme, the way successful gamblers think, in a chapter titled, "Less and Less and Less Wrong."

Silver takes a look at a very successful gambler, Haralabos "Bob" Voulgaris:

But although there isn't any one particular key to why Voulgaris might or might not bet on a given game, there is a particular type of thought process that helps govern his decisions. It is called Bayesian reasoning.

Thomas Bayes was an English minister who was probably born in 1701 -- although it may have been 1702. Very little is certain about Bayes's life, even though he lent his name to an entire branch of statistics and perhaps its most famous theorem. It is not even clear that anybody knows what Bayes looked like; the portrait of him that is commonly used in encyclopedia articles may have been misattributed.

Bayes's much more famous work (much more famous than "Divine Benevolence"), "An Essay toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances," was not published until after his death, when it was brought to the Royal Society's attention in 1763 (Isaac Newton had died in 1727) by a friend of his named Richard Price. It concerned how we formulate probabilistic beliefs about the world when we encounter new data.

The argument made by Bayes and Price is not that the world is intrinsically probabilistic or uncertain. Bayes was a believer in divine perfection; he was also an advocate of Isaac Newton's work, which had seemed to suggest that nature follows regular and predictable laws. It is, rather, a statement -- expressed both mathematically and philosophically -- about how we learn about the universe: that we learn about it through approximation, getting closer and closer to the truth as we gather more evidence.

This contrasted with the more skeptical viewpoint of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who argues that since we could not be certain that the sun would rise again, a prediction that it would (rise again) as inherently no more rational than one that it wouldn't (rise again). The Bayesian viewpoint, instead, regards rationality as a probabilistic matter. In essence, Bayes and Price are telling Hume, don't blame nature because you are too daft to understand it; if you step out of your skeptical shell and some some predictions about its behavior, perhaps you will get a little closer to the truth.

Silver has chapters on poker, chess, baseball, basketball, earthquakes, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and terroism.

He asks the question many of us in the US have asked: why don't terrorists blow up shopping malls. The answer may surprise you. His graph on page 442, terror attack frequency by death toll in Israel, 1979 - 2009 is striking, and shows that "the fact that Israel's power-law graph looks so distinct is evidence that our strategic choices do make some difference." This gets back to his chapter on chess phenom Kasparov winning against Big Blue: Kasparov won because of a strategic decision; Big Blue was programmed to make tactical decisions.