The Energy, Market, And Political Page, T+18 -- August 31, 2018

All major indices have just turned green.

WTI has dropped slightly below $70.

Analysts' forecast for average price of Brent crude in 2019: link here.

• overall respondents, 44%: between $70 - $80/bbl
• 23%: $80 - $90/bbl
• 23%: below $70/bbl
• 14%: above $90/bbl
• in other words, all but 23% said Brent will be where it is today or higher in 2019
• Fitch Solutions Macro Research: $82/bbl -- 2019
• Bloomberg Consensus: $69.50/bbl -- 2019
• short-term, Fitch said, Brent will struggle for direction, but the long-term trend will be toward $91 in 2022

The market (I assume this is going to be a light volume trading day -- four day weekend):

• Dow, irrelevant: up 15 points
• NOG: down 2.5 cents, about a percnet
• OAS: down 9 cents, about 3/4th percent
• CVX: down 1%, struggling
• TSLA: down to $301
• AAPL: remains on a tear -- up another $2.55
• AMZN: monopoly? up $15 - that should put Amazon over $1 trillion market cap .. let's see ... nope, at $983 billion; Apple?  $1.099 trillion market cap
• GOOG: monopoly? down $8
• NFLX: up almost $3

Apple: the September roll-out is going to be huge. I think it's going to be the second- or third-largest roll-out of Apple products since the original iPhone announcement. I listened to a panel of talking heads yesterday, including Gene Munster, on CNBC regarding Apple. Munster gets it; the CNBC  talking heads did not. It almost seemed most of the CNBC talking heads still used a Blackberry (see this link).

One debate centered on "form factor." Apparently Apple will come out with a "bigger" iPhone -- panelists not sure consumers would like a larger format. If Apple comes up with a multi-phone / one telesphone number solution, this would be huge. Technically Apple is there with a pocket-size iPhone and a super-size iPad but convert that iPad to an iPhone with the same telephone number as the pocket-size iPhone -- you have instant "Schwab office of the future / Cisco Telepresence."

Another debate centered on hardware. The CNBC analysts appeared not to understand the Chinese market.

Another debate centered on the Apple ecosystem with one CNBC analyst actually saying that "the Apple ecosystem seems pretty good." 

One almost gets the feeling that these CNBC analysts hold a lot of GE stock. GE is the parent company of Apple competitor Microsoft and is the parent company of NBC and CNBC. I would assume CNBC employees all use Microsoft products.

The rollout, as rumored, here.

• three new iPhones (no home button; and nearly all screen)
• a larger 6.5-inch version of the iPhone X with three rear cameras (?)
• Apple Pencil support (?)
• a less expensive 6.1-inch version shipping in October
• since its debut, the iPhone SE -- its most affordable option -- the one I have and love -- could be stuffed into a smaller body of an iPhone 5; a 4-inch refreshed SE could retail at $349 -- over 24 months, $29/month -- ATT would give them away with a data plan contract
• the Apple Watch 4
• new iPad Pros
• refresh the Mac line
• MacBook Air replacement (?)
• a whole lot more
• the article fails to mention a re-freshed iMac Mini