Notes From All Over, Part 3 -- October 28, 2019

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Futures: moving up all night. Pretty much flat early in the evening, Sunday night, then about 40 - 50 points on the upside at 4:00 a.m. CT this morning. Then 50 points on the upside when NYC commuters were starting to commute, and now ... wow, look at this ... Dow futures up 91 points.

First thing to check: Boeing -- that will either drag the Dow down or pull it up. And here it is, Boeing is slightly green in pre-market trading. A great omen.

Others:

• Of course the buzz today will be all about Tiffany.
• AAPL? up slightly, but it's had such an incredible run ...
• The one that concerns me the most: SRE. Too big to fail, but that was also true of PCG and PCG is failing. I find it somewhat trivial that the governor of California would be talking about Warren Buffett buying PCG when tens of thousands of Californians may lose their homes; hundreds of thousands are being evacuated from their homes; and, millions of Californians are off the grid for up to a week.  
• Can you spell Generac? A year ago, GNRC at $50/share; today, will open above $91/share.

Back to PCG. Mass blackouts ...  a little bit of history:

• Wired, October 10, 2019
• California Globe, June 10, 2019

PCG: can a stock go to zero?

• 2017: $70/share
• one year ago: $48/share
• Friday, last: $5.0000 after falling $2.2000 (a 30% drop) -- you know a company is in trouble when its shrs are priced out to the fourth decimal point
• pre-market today: down another 26% to $3.6800
• my hunch: California pension agency (CaPERS) had significant holdings in PCG at one time; would love to see an LA Times story on this; how fast CalPERS got out of PCG;
• current holdings, back to 2016 - 2017
• Pacific Gas & Electric: not among CalPERS top ten holdings, but at $77 million last year, a sizeable holding -- but dropping fast; for 2017 - 2018 report, their PCG shares were valued at $42; today they are valued at $3. If CalPERs has not sold, their paper value of $77 million last year is about $5 million now
• that was equity; CalPERS also held a lot of PCG corporate bonds
• disclaimer: I often make simple arithmetic mistakes

LAX: starting tomorrow, Uber and Lyft are banned from curbside pick ups.

Favorite non-US newspapers:

• Daily Mail Online; of all the things going on in the world, top story -- Trump booed at World Series.
• The [London] Telegraph: top story -- Brexit ... another extension
• The [London] Guardian/US -- top story -- "doubts emerge over Trump's dramatic account of Baghdadi raid"

Of the four, Daily Mail might be the most graphically entertaining, rewarding, interesting. And it has all that "Hollywood" stuff to boot.