Is Buffett This Smart Or Just Lucky? -- March 15, 2018; A Norwegian Wins The Iditarod

Arnold Palmer Invitational: Tiger Woods will be playing. Starts today.

March Madness: "First Four" completed, and now to the tournament. Huge day today as the first round begins. Sixteen (16) games today. The game to watch: Alabama vs Virginia Tech.

Iditarod: after conquering the Winter Olympics, a Norwegian wins the Iditarod.

Statoil name change: to Equinor. Removes "oil" from name. Embraces renewable energy. My hunch: under duress they made the decision -- a political necessity. 

Another casualty due to Apple, Inc: iHeartRadio files for bankruptcy

• victim of "streaming"
• two players in this sector: Apple, Inc and Spotify
• Apple Music now has 36 million paying subscribers; only 30 million one last September (2017)
• Apple Music could eclipse Spotify this year (2018)

Texture:

• Apple buys Texture
• turns out Amazon considered buying Texture; backed off; already had Kindle Cloud Reader

Under the radar/connecting the dots:

• roll-back of Dodd-Frank; big win for big banks
• Buffett buys Bnnk of New York Mellon
• Buffett's largest holding: AAPL
• Apple, Inc, hires Bank of New York Mellon to protect its cash assets in Ireland
• Buffett buys BK back in September, 2017; Congress starts rolling back Dodd-Frank in early 2018
• Buffett really, really smart? was this the reason he Wells Fargo -- knowing that Dodd-Frank was going to be rolled back
• Buffett's hand in lobbying Congress on this one?
• Buffett just lucky?

Jobs report: econoday -- first time unemployment claims -- unremarkable

• forecast: 229K
• actual: 226K
• prior (revised): 230K
  

Chart of the day: look at the decline of US - Saudi oil imports year-over-year, via Twitter:

****************************************

Active rigs:

$61.35↑	3/15/2018	03/15/2017	03/15/2016	03/15/2015	03/15/2014
Active Rigs	57	46	30	112	190

RBN Energy: the power generation drivers of East Coast gas demand growth.

The worst of this winter’s cold has passed, but the impact of structural changes in U.S. power generation will be felt in natural gas markets for years to come. The generation mix has been changing rapidly in recent years, and the switch from coal to gas is happening at an even faster pace on the East Coast than in the country overall.

This switch reflects both coal-plant retirements and ongoing competition between remaining coal plants and gas plants. But low-cost gas supplies in the Marcellus and Utica plays don’t always have ready access to the biggest consuming markets, and this winter, we saw how the increasing call on gas for Eastern power generation can stress the gas pipeline grid and cause price blowouts. Today, we continue a series on Eastern power generation and prices by untangling the sources and drivers of gas-fired generation growth in the region.