July 16, 2014: Crude Oil Inventories Decreased 7.5 Million Bbls; Weekly Petroleum Report -- EIA; Gasoline Demand Continues To Increase

Just a reminder (and a placeholder for me): the EIA's weekly petroleum report is released at 10:30 a.m. EDT later this morning. Oh, I guess it's already "later" this morning on the east coast -- here's the report for the week ending July 11, 2014:

• refinery inputs increased 374,000 bpd over previous week
• refineries operated at almost 94% capacity (a high number)
• gasoline production decreased last week
• crude oil imports averaged over 7.4 million bpd, up by 142,000 bpd from previous week
• however, the four-week average for imports shows a 5% decrease compared to last year
• crude oil inventories decreased by 7.5 million bbls from the previous week, but inventories remain near the upper limit of the average for this time of year

Comment: unremarkable.

Gasoline demand in graphic representation can be found here. At that link, scroll to the very bottom. Gasoline demand continues to increase.

WTI crude oil seems to have hit bottom after just dipping below $100. Over the past 24 hours, WTI was trending up once again, now up about 1% from yesterday, slightly over $100. The weekly oil report did not seem to move the needle much, if any. [Update: at 11:13 a.m. EDT, WTI was up about 1.3%.]

Israel getting ready to stomp on Gaza: Israel warns 100,000 Palestinians to leave northern Gaza. The Syrian president is sworn in for another seven years. This is the guy that President Obama said "had to go" back in 2011.  So, it looks like this guy will go ... in seven years. Because the US appears no longer interested in Iraq, not much news coming out of that country (mainstream media doesn't report on it at all; CNN is focused on missing planes; FOX News is focused on politics, fair and balanced; and even The WSJ doesn't have a lot to say about Iraq). The last thing I heard on Libya was that it was about ready to implode: even the UN has pulled out. About the only news: John Kerry is counting votes in Afghanistan.

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Whatever Happened To Flip?

Yahoo!Finance is reporting:

At Cisco Systems, it was the iPhone’s simple camera that cut deep. Cisco CEO John Chambers shuttered his company’s consumer-oriented Flip camera division in 2011, just two years after he bought the business for almost $600 million.

Flip was Cisco’s play to become more than just a corporate-focused company and to sell directly to consumers. “The window was open to play in the consumer as data, voice [and] video came together in the home,” Chambers explained.

But Steve Jobs was holding up a Flip camera as his prime target as he added better and smaller cameras to iPhones, iPods and the iPads. The “free” camera feature in all the Apple devices crushed Flip’s market.

Ballmer's take at the time:

Back in January 2007, when Jobs first showed the new device, he pitched it as a combination phone, music player and Internet communicator.

But competitors including Microsoft's then-CEO Steve Ballmer and Motorola's former CEO Ed Zander could barely contain their disdain. "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share," Ballmer said of the lineup that has since sold more than 500 million devices. 

 I came close to buying a Flip -- but it seemed difficult to use. The iPhone/iPad camera/movie app: 1. push the icon. 2. point and shoot. Insanely simple.

AAPL, by the way, is on a tear, nearing the $100 mark -- or $700/share pre-split. Pre-market trading it was up as much as $14/share (on a pre-split basis; now it's up about $8).