The Market, Energy, Political, And Fake News Page, T+70 -- August 9, 2018

Regardless of where the trade war stands on T+75, I plan to move on after that date. We'll have to see what the president tweets on Day 75 of the trade war. Right now I'm leaning toward "T+1 on Iran sanctions."

From CNM today:

Now, back to the market.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.

Wow, I'm in a good mood.

WTI: for investors, we are still well above the sweet spot. The sweet spot for me, is around $55-WTI. That's low enough to prevent any adverse effect on the overall economy, and the oil companies will do just fine. At $66-WTI, the oil companies should be doing very, very well, and the economy should do just fine. Saudi Arabia will pretty much implode if they can't get oil above current price point.

WTI: the consensus on the street suggests that oil will trend higher, although I have a bit of trouble thinking it will trend much higher than its recent highs.

Ticker symbols:

• AAPL: hit a new high today. And it wasn't subtle: up over 1%; up over $2.25/share. Wow. Who wudda guessed? I was thinking that by now folks would be taking profits. My hunch: before the year is out, talk of a dividend increase will crescendo.
• BRK-B: up slightly; nothing to write home about but going in the right direction.
• NOG: nimble traders -- which I'm not -- could have done well on NOG today. It dropped almost ten percent shortly after the opening, trading below $3.00/share, but recovered, and is now down less than 5%, trading at $3.16. Had one bought 10,000 shares of NOG at $2.98 ($29,800) and then sold at $3.15, a nice gain of $1,700 in about one hour. Again, remember, this is not an investment site. 
• ENB: up 1%; earlier this week it was reported that Enbridge would be bringing on-line $7 billion worth of projects by the end of the year
• EEP: up 2%
• EPD: up slightly less than 1%; also, the July, 2018, distribution was a bit higher than the July, 2017, distribution
• KMI: up a bit less than 1%
• TRP (the Keystone XL; the Trans Mountain folks): up over 1%; could "charge" Canada 26% more to complete the Trans Mountain project, and Canada really has no choice but to pay whatever it takes at this point
• SRE: up slightly
• S: up half a percent
• COP is up 1% but CVX is down a bit 

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The Book Page

I don't have the book in front of me so I can't quote from it.

The book:

She Has her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, Carl Zimmer, c. 2018. Paging through it suggests it's the kind of book I generally don't like -- a great thesis, but veering off in all directions, but it's thick at 574 pages and will keep me occupied for the week.

I suppose I'm about a third of the way through the book, reading a couple of chapters each evening. I can't say I really, really enjoy the book, but it's written in such a way that makes it difficult to put it down. The writing seems a bit "wordy" and the author interjects a lot of banality with long passages about his immediate family that seem unnecessary, but there may be a "revelation" regarding his own daughters by the end of the book.

This is what makes the book fascinating: his unique way of connecting the dots with regard to following the "genetics" story. He seems to start off with some trivial point about genetics, develops the story over several pages, even over several chapters, connecting the dots, until a most interesting story develops.

The most recent example: somehow, the author got onto the subject of "feeblemindedness" which led to the Kallikak family and then to Vineland Training School. And, then after having brought up Pearl S Buck earlier, which confused me, the author comes back full circle to tell the story of Pearl Buck's only biological/natural daughter. Pearl Buck did have an adopted daughter.

One would think with my background in pediatrics, I would know "all there is to know" about PKU (phenylketonuria) but I completely missed this story.

It turns out the physician who "discovered" the cause of phenylketonuria was a Norwegian. I wish I had known that in high school. My absolutely wonderful eastern European chemistry teacher said he would have given me an "A" for the course if I could find any Norwegian that produced anything of value. LOL. It was all in great fun. I think. I hope.

I'm not sure I can recommend the book to the general audience, but for someone who likes connecting dots in the world of genetics, this book is very rewarding.

On another note, right, wrong, or indifferent, it was interesting to read the author's short summary of Rosalind, Watson, and Crick and their discovery of the nature of DNA.

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Straws

Sophia can relate to this. Sophia loves playing "tag, you're it!"