Notes From All Over, Part 1 -- January 16, 2020

$13 trillion: that's the amount equities have appreciated since President Trump took office.

$7 trillion: that's the amount of assets that BlackRock has under management. According to The WSJ, "BlackRock's assets blew past $7 trillion in milestone for investment giant." It was $5.98 trillion at the close of 2018; at the end of 2019, $7.43 trillion. Earnings scheduled to be reported January 29, 2020.

Alcoa: misses by a mile.

• forecast: an adjusted loss of 21 cents/share; sales of $2.5 billion
• actual: an adjust loss of 31 cents/share; sales of $2.4 billion

Keystone XL: inches forward.

Heavy construction equipment will be moved to worker campsites and pipeline storage sites in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska in February, the Calgary-based company said in a filing with the U.S. District Court in Montana on Tuesday. TC then plans to start building the part of the conduit that crosses the U.S.-Canada border in April.

Deere: buy a bigger tractor. Deere aims to reap billions with "corn warrior" technologies.

The average acre of corn planted in the U.S. yields more than 170 bushels. A bushel—an old measure of weight—is 56 pounds of corn kernels. That means corn planted on an acre—the standard U.S. measure of farming area that is a chain times a furlong, two other old measures—generates almost 5 tons of food.

That is impressive, but there are more-impressive feats of corn.

The top of the range—the best farmers can do—is more than 600 bushels an acre. One farmer grew 616 bushels of corn on an irrigated acre with Corteva (CTVA) seed in the national corn-growing contest.

Yes, there is such a contest.

The farmers competing—some of whom call themselves corn warriors—are spending a lot of time and money ensuring the health of each corn plant. Nothing is too small to measure. It might not be practical or cost-effective to adopt all the techniques used to generate incredible crop yields en masse. But the yields they achieve demonstrate the upper fertility limit of American cropland. 

Chain times a furlong?

• chain: 66 feet or 22 yards; 100 links; 4 rods
• chain: 100 links (Gunter's chain)
• furlong: 1,000 links
• from wiki:

The rod or perch or pole (sometimes also lug) is a surveyor’s tool and unit of length exactly equal to ​5 1⁄2 yards, 16​1⁄2 feet, ​1⁄320 of a statute mile, or one-fourth of a surveyor's chain (approximately 5.0292 meters). 

The rod is useful as a unit of length because whole number multiples of it can form one acre of square measure. The 'perfect acre'[2] is a rectangular area of 43,560 square feet, bounded by sides 660 feet (a furlong) long and 66 feet wide (220 yards and 22 yards) or, equivalently, 40 rods and 4 rods. An acre is therefore 160 square rods.

Acre: amazing how it has survived. I suppose after President Jefferson's survey, the "acre" as a unit was too big to fail. No way was there going to be any interest in changing everything to metric.