I Was Off By A Day: I Thought Yesterday Was Going To Be A Big Day -- Posted July 30, 2014; Bloomberg Still Refers To The Bakken As Booming Regardless Of What The Atlantic Monthly Says

... but it looks like today is going to be the big day.

The "big day" actually started just after the market closed yesterday: the SM Energy-Baytex story; the Menard's story; a new AAPL story; and so forth.

The "big day" continues into today.

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.

HES (Hess) soars! Hess soars on quarterly results and Bakken MLP formation.

Hess soared after reporting better-than-expected quarterly earnings and saying it will form a tax-advantaged master-limited partnership to hold railcars, trucking, storage and processing facilities in North Dakota’s booming Bakken Shale region.

Shares of the New York-based oil producer rose 4.2 percent to $103.62 at 9:09 a.m. before the start of regular trading in New York. Excluding one-time items, per-share profit for the second quarter was $1.38, exceeding the average of 24 analysts’ estimates by 20 cents.

Creating a partnership for the Bakken assets would reduce the tax burden, since master-limited partnerships don’t pay federal income tax. Hess is the latest to propose forming such a partnership, known as an MLP, as companies seek ways to cut the 35 percent corporate U.S. tax rate.

With regard to Hess, here's the BIG story, from the linked article:

The new partnership will include a natural gas processing plant in Tioga, North Dakota, as well as railcars and a loading facility for transporting oil from the region. It will also have a propane facility in Mentor, Minnesota. 

Don picked up on this. Does this mean that Hess will have a pipeline from the Bakken to Mentor, MN? Or is it something entirely different. I missed this until today, and Reuters just posted it last month:

As politicians debate the dangers of a massive increase in oil carried by rail in North America, railroads and energy producers are considering the same for natural gas.
Buoyed by the unexpected success of crude by rail, companies are beginning to consider transporting natural gas as remote drilling frontiers emerge beyond the reach of pipelines, executives said. 

Natural gas by rail is years away and likely to face strong public resistance after a series of explosive crude-by-rail accidents. But the potentially multibillion-dollar development could connect gas-rich regions like North Dakota with urban centers, presenting an opportunity for railroads, drillers and tank car makers already cashing in from hauling oil on trains. 

It could also be a cure for environmentally unfriendly flaring, a growing problem in far-flung areas where more than $1 billion of natural gas produced alongside oil is burned off each year for lack of processing plants or pipelines that can take years to build. 

Everything, they said, is years away, in this business.  Mentor, MN, is about 45 miles southeast of Grand Forks, and is on the main BNSF rail line across the northern tier. I don't think this has anything to do with diluent for Canadian heavy oil. Hess ships diluent from its Tioga facility directly north to Canada.

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President Obama Needs to Work on Foreign Policy, Not His Golf Game -- The LA Times

Near Total Collapse of America's Foreign Policy -- Their Words, Not Mine

An LA Times op-ed:

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. On Saturday, President Obama played golf while his foreign policy, and that of the nation he leads, was going up in smoke.

Literally.

Saturday was the day the State Department ordered the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Libya. Only three years ago, Obama helped NATO allies overthrow Moammar Kadafi as part of his “lead from behind” doctrine, but he has done little to help the resulting democratic government secure its authority.

Not only did the U.S. not support sending international peacekeepers, it didn't mount a serious program to train a new Libyan army. The predictable result has been utter chaos. In September 2012, U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi. In recent days, much of Tripoli's main airport has been destroyed in militia fighting. The embassy staff had to be evacuated overland as thick black smoke from the fighting hung over the Tripoli skyline.

In any other circumstances — and especially if the chief executive were a Republican — this would have been a scandal blared across the media. But at a time when we are witnessing the near-total collapse of American foreign policy, it barely registers.

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Another Fine Observation

On July 24, 2014, I wrote:

The next big thing: mobile payments -- and it will be head-to-head, Apple vs Facebook. Apple has the eco-niche: hardware, integrated operating system, a cult-following, a handshake with IBM. But the killer technology Apple has: iBeacon. One won't even have to take one's credit card out or mobile device out to pay for one's purchase. iBeacon's range is measured in meters, and is scalable/flexible/personal. Apple doesn't talk much about iBeacon; it's just there. iBeacon even has its own wiki entry. I talk about "the next big thing" here.   

It took them a bit longer, but Yahoo!Finance noticed the same thing and posted a great story yesterday:

The expected iPhone 6 and iWatch may not be the only big things down the pike for Apple.

The tech giant is reportedly looking at getting into the mobile payment business. According to published reports, Apple is said to be in talks with credit card companies to create a service that would allow users to pay for items with the iPhones acting as credit cards.

But other than that little snippet, it's actually a pretty superficial article. I did not watch the video.