The Energy And Market Page, Part 2, T+244 -- September 21, 2017

Unemployment claims: huge, unexpected drop. The forecast was for first time claims to actually increase from 284,000 to 303,00 -- an increase of almost 20,000 first time claims. In fact, the number dropped. And it did not drop by an insignificant amount. The drop was huge. The number of first time unemployment claims dropped 23,000. If one adds the 20,000 forecast to the 23,000 decrease, the analysts were a) off in the direction of the move; and, b) off by more than 40,000 claims. 

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

Surprise! Anadarko to spend $2.5 billion on "massive" share buyback -- Reuters via Rigzone. Data points:

• amounts to 10% of its outstanding shares at current prices
• this was announced yesterday
• APC: rose 2.4% yesterday

Oasis Midstream Partners begins trading today (OMP). Hess Midstream (HESM) is also trading.

Investment tip: I do not hold shares in CP or CNI and have no plans to do so. I am posting this for two reasons. The first reason is because a "talking head" on CNBC this morning recommended CP because of huge amounts of fracking sand coming from Canada. I was unaware of that; decided to check. It turns out the analyst was likely to be correct. At Athabasca Minerals check out the "Tech Report" pdf where the company discusses its frack sand initiative that began in 2014.  From the PDF, this connection with Canadian National Railway:

The Firebag Project is composed of three components; the mine site where the raw silica sand is mined, the Lynton trans-loading area, and the yet to be defined site in the Edson/Hinton site, where the ROM silica sand will be processed to produce a marketable frac sand product.

For the purposes of this report, the Edson/Hinton area will be referred to as the Edson area due to the uncertainty of the location of the processing plant at the time this report was authored. Also, in the cost analysis, the travel time of the rail cars on the Canadian National Railway Company (CN) rail line is to the town of Edson, Alberta.

The other reason is because I accumulated BNI (Burlington Northern) for years until Warren Buffett bought the company, and then I switched to another US railroad which has, all of a sudden, shown a bit of life. Again, see the disclaimer. I was more interested in the veracity of the analyst regarding Canadian fracking sand and less interested in the investment side of the story, but that was rewarding also. Both CNI and CP are trading near their 52-week high; the former was down insignificantly yesterday; the latter had a nice 1% jump yesterday.

As long as I'm rambling -- as long as Minnesota continues to block the expansion of the Enbridge crude oil pipeline and until the Keystone XL is built (if it's ever built), the Canadian railroads might be beneficiaries.