Another Filloon Bakken Update; NDIC's Daily Activity Report Index Finally "Back Up" -- September 6, 2016

At the moment, the September 1, 2016, daily activity report is linked including Friday's September 2, 2016, report, but don't bother going there. I was correct when I suggested there were technical problems. There was no Friday activity report due to technical difficulties. And, of course, Monday, was a holiday. See you this afternoon.

The index is at this link.

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Filloon Bakken Update

Not long ago I mentioned that a surge in Filloon Bakken updates suggests the boom is back. Here's perhaps the fifth Filloon Bakken update in just the past few weeks.  Summary:

• Enhanced completions continue to improve initial production rates in US unconventional plays.
• Mega-fracs were only used sparingly in 2015, but still improved 270-day production year over year by 22%.
• As oil prices improve, we will find that improvements in well design provide a much larger footprint of development in US plays.
• If correct, production increases could be much more substantial at lower prices than analysts expect.

A more detailed look at the latest Filloon Bakken update is here. 

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A Blind Spot

I canceled my New Yorker magazine a few weeks ago. The few non-Hillary stories were no longer relevant. I, however, do "read" the magazine every week at the local library.

This week's issues:

• only one short item on Hillary; only one big cartoon on Hillary and Trump (and, surprisingly, it was fair and balanced);
• two articles at the back I would enjoy reading: one on philosophy; one on annual business report letters written by CEOs to investors;
• and, then this one: "How do you go about reforming a corrupt political system?" I looked forward to an article on Chicago or maybe Detroit, but instead the very, very long article is a "Letter from Kiev: After the Revolutions" and, of course, about Ukraine. 

Wow. Talk about a blind spot.

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How Tough Can Investing Be?

In the short note above, I referenced an article in this week's issue of The New Yorker. Here's the article and the link: a book review of Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism, JeffGramm, c. 2016 (I believe).

The essay ends with:

For the rest of us, the difficulty is in telling the guys who can be trusted with your money from the guys who can’t.

Warren Buffett can, and his letters make it sound easy. (“There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult,” he says.) Reading him, you think, How hard can this investing business be?

His biographer gives us a clue as to the answer. When Buffett was in high school, he was earning twenty-one hundred dollars a year, more than his teachers, from a daily paper route. With the proceeds, he bought a forty-acre farm in Nebraska.

So that’s the answer: if you bought a farm with your earnings while still in high school, you, too, will find investing simple. If not, business letters can still be fun to read, but it might be best to regard them as a form of literary fiction.