Sunday Night Ramblings, Part 1 -- April 28, 2019

Wow, I can hardly wait for Monday, only twelve hours away, and I will be back at work, blogging away.

I see WTI is now trading solidly below $63. This should get the price of gasoline down. If not, President Trump will have to have another talk with Prince Salman.

WTI: lots and lots of articles on where WTI is headed. You can probably find whatever you want to find to fit your "worldview."

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Cleaning Out The In-Box

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AAPL:

• name one product you have within arm's length 24/7 -- yup, your Apple iPhone
• earnings preview:
• EPS: $2.37
• revenue: $57.4 billion, down 6% from a year ago
• guidance: $2.08 and $51.93 billion for 2Q19
• sales:
• iPhone units: 42 million
• margins:
• looking for 38%

Pigs: we talked about this a few weeks ago; now The WSJ is reporting that US meat companies are gaining from "hog culling" in China.

Swine fever has decimated China's herds, creating opportunities. Earlier, April 4, 2019: China's production has fallen 10% this year (in line with original post in which production was anticipated to drop to 51 million tonnes from 55 million tonnes).  Let's see what they say now:

China’s agricultural ministry estimated recently that there were 19% fewer hogs in the country in March than a year earlier. Losing that much pork output in the country that is home to half the world’s pigs would cut the global meat supply by some 6% on an annualized basis.

Deep pockets: Big Oil's biggest weapon in the Permian.

Say what? Boeing didn't advise airlines or the FAA that it shut off the warning system. Acident investigators have linked bad data the system is designed to detect to the deadly Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes. Color me perplexed.

Boeing Co.  didn’t tell Southwest Airlines Co.   and other carriers when they began flying its 737 MAX jets that a safety feature found on earlier models that warns pilots about malfunctioning sensors had been deactivated, according to government and industry officials.

Federal Aviation Administration safety inspectors and supervisors responsible for monitoring Southwest, the largest 737 MAX customer, also were unaware of the change, the officials said.

The alerts inform pilots whether a sensor known as an “angle-of-attack vane” is transmitting errant data about the pitch of a plane’s nose. Accident investigators have linked such bad data to the deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash in March and the Lion Air crash last year; both planes lacked the alert system.

Goldilocks economy: the stock market continues to climb as inflation remains just right. The best thing Jerome Powell could do right now is put more "golf time" on his daily schedule. First, do no harm.

The stock market’s latest leg higher has been fueled by better-than-expected earnings, as well as data suggesting the economy grew faster than initially expected in the first three months of the year. Those reports have offered investors reassurance that the economy is on solid footing after a soft patch had cast some doubt on the expansion’s durability in the final months of 2018.

My favorite company: how Schwab ate Wall Street. The firm was a discount broker for amateurs. Then its CEO turned it into a personal-finance supermarket that's dragging rivals in its wake. I've talked about Schwab and Merrill Lynch in the past few weeks.

When Walt Bettinger’s 3 a.m. alarm sounds, among the first things the Charles Schwab Corp. chief executive does is check how much net new money his company has pulled in over the past 24 hours. Last year, that was an average of $624 million a day—more than its three biggest Wall Street rivals combined.

Schwab was known mostly as a discount broker for amateurs when he took the helm in 2008 from founder Charles R. “Chuck” Schwab. Now it resembles something more like a personal-finance supermarket, offering services for the wealthy and budget-minded alike, at rock-bottom prices, spanning trading, banking and advice, both human and robotic.

Once barely noticed by the denizens of Wall Street, Schwab has amassed a stockpile of client assets that dwarfs those at Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley ’s brokerage arm and UBS Group AG’s Americas unit. Its stock is up 76% since the end of 2007, versus 26% for the Dow Jones U.S. Select Investment Services Index.

India: a few weeks ago I linked a story in which India told Trump: "bring it on. We have plenty of alternative sources for oil. " LOL. Trump called India's bluff. Apparently India is now scrambling.

After the Trump administration’s Monday announcement that the United States would not renew its six-month waivers to third party countries for their continued purchase of Iranian oil, India has been put in an extremely tough position, and it’s still not clear which way the nation will go. Will India defy U.S. sanctions and continue to import Iranian oil, or will the nation’s leaders be willing to lose their third biggest crude supplier in favor of maintaining a good relationship with the United States?

India is the third-largest oil consumer in the world, and nearly 80 percent of its oil demand is met with imported oil. India is also the second-biggest purchaser of Iranian oil, after China. All this is to say that the loss of Iranian oil due to sanctions would be a major blow to the fast-developing subcontinent. India was one of eight countries that has been granted a waiver to continue importing Iranian oil (although in smaller quantities) for a six-month grace period. That period ends May 1st, leaving India (not to mention China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Italy and Greece) in the lurch.

The nuclear option: how to stop transmission-line-forest fires -- shut down the grid. And that's what PG&E plans to do going forward.

When dangerously high winds arise this year, PG&E says it will black out fire-prone areas that are home to 5.4 million people. Not to worry: those folks all have wind and solar energy generators in their back yards.

Deer in the headlights: LA officials trying to explain what happened. Sounds like some people didn't do things -- like didn't get measles vaccinations. From AP News, dumb and dumber:

More than 1,000 students and staff members at two Los Angeles universities were quarantined on campus or sent home this week in one of the most sweeping efforts yet by public health authorities to contain the spread of measles in the U.S., where cases have reached a 25-year high .

By Friday afternoon, two days after Los Angeles County ordered the precautions, about 325 of those affected had been cleared to return after proving their immunity to the disease, through either medical records or tests, health officials said.

The action at the University of University of California, Los Angeles, and California State University, Los Angeles — which together have more than 65,000 students — reflected the seriousness with which public health officials are taking the nation’s outbreak.

Two days one day too long? Amazon plans to make Prime a one day delivery service. That gasp you heard came from Target. Walmart? Look at their aisles. You think those folks use the internet? LOL. No link, the story is everywhere.