Market And Energy News, T+26 -- February 15, 2017

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Mid-Afternoon

New records: Dow Jones up 105 points, around 20,605. 

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Mid-Morning 

New records: Dow Jones up over 80 100 points. Hits a new all-time record. Hits 20,600. This is truly insane. To infinity and beyond.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, travel, job, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here. If this is important to you, go to the source.

Crude oil build: 9.53 million bbls; 3x forecast. Link here. This comes on top of a 14-million-bbl build last week which was about 7x forecast. And yet the price of crude oil not dropping all that much. See graphs here.

Refinery utilization: 85%

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Opening

DAPL: contamination of Cannonball River likely -- due to activists and Native Americans protesting pipeline. 

GDP Now: new estimate is expected to be released later today.

ObamaCare: Humana to exit ObamaCare, 2018. ObamaCare is tracked here. IRS won't reject tax filings that don't include healthcare insurance information. Shares of Aetna and Humans continue to surge.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, travel, job, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here. If this is important to you, go to the source.

Apple: Warren Buffett quadrupled his stake in Apple. Story here.

Walmart: Warren Buffett sold off almost all of his shares in Walmart, close to $1 billion. The story here: the end of retail as we know it. Doomsday: the demise of the big box store.

GM: looking to exit Europe; talk: sell Opel to Peugeot; would "catapult" Peugeot into being #2 auto group in Europe. Ah, yes, Peugeot. The new "poster child" for the EU?

Attention to detail/sticking to one's knitting works: Devon Energy beats profit estimates as cost cuts pay off. Data points:

• bigger-than-expected quarterly profit
• total operating expenses fell 67%
• total cost savings exceeded $1 billion in 2016
• has sold all its non-core assets; completing a $3.2 divestiture program in October
• 2017 production expected to be about 550,000 boepd
• EPS of 63 cents/share; compared with a loss of $11.12/share a year earlier
• adjusted, earned 25 cents/share vs forecast of 21 cents/share

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The Market

Futures:

• Dow Jones: +26 points
• WTI: below $53, again 

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The Literature Page

Modern Painters, John Ruskin, edited and abridged by David Barrie, c. 1987.

From the introduction:

The greatest influence apparent in Volume I -- apart from the works of J. M. W. Turner himself -- is Wordsworth. 

In accordance with his espousal of the ancient theory that saw painting and poetry as "sister arts," Ruskin draws on Wordsworth for examples of good landscape "painting"; but his debt to Wordsworth extends also to the theoretical level. 

The basic argument of Volume I is closely analogous to that proposed by Wordsworth in the Preface to the Lyricl Ballds, the first publication of which in 1800 marked the birth of English Romantic poetics. 

Just as Wordsworth rejected the artifice of classical poetic diction in favour of "the real language of men," so Ruskin, more than forty years later, attacked the attempts by classical landscape painters to "improve" or idealize nature, contrasting their distortions of reality with the "truthfulness" of Turner.