Notes From All Over -- Pre-Market Edition -- August 31, 2020

First things first: market open. AAPL up $2.40 on post-split pricing. Up $9.60 on pre-split price. Trading at $127.20 or almost $510, pre-split. Most tech stocks down in early morning trading; not true for AAPL. AAPL is now (8:42 a.m. CDT) up over $3.00/share or up over $12/share pre-split price, trading near $128 or $512, pre-split. [Pretty funny: now CNBC says stock splits matter. LOL.]

The new Dow 30: all three new components (CRM, HON, and AMGN) down in early morning trading on first day (?) with these new components.

Another Covid casualty: parking garages idle as car owners pull out of NYC. Former monthly customers are calling and canceling permanently saying they are leaving the city. Most interesting "thing" about this story: it's not in some ZeroHedge hyped article: this is in the conservative, well-trusted WSJ. Amazing. 

The market: maybe we'll come back to this later. I posted some early numbers earlier. Pre-market Dow is very volatile, flipping from red to green and back. I think it has to do with WMT and MSFT on the Dow and what is going on with TikTok, and the new components: HON, AMGN, and CRM (especially the latter).

Dividends: Chevron, EPD -- Motley Fool, July 26, 2020. Enbridge is in the mix: earnings date linked through this site. IIRCC: earnings came in at expectations; no surprises.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

GE shares: huge drop; big analyst pulls out. 

Bitcoin: energy consumption continues to grow. Oilprice.

Where rigs  count: the North Sea. And now it's being reported that "North Sea oil" faces a drilling rig supply crunch -- driving up prices. Oilprice. 

Splits: wow, there must be a large number of folks that don't understand splits (which I doubt); CNBC continues to spend an inordinate amount of time on the AAPL and TSLA split. This SeekingAlpha article will probably disappear behind a paywall eventually: more chatter about stock splits.

Best Monday morning article to read, and lo and behold, it's also over at Oilprice. This link and excerpts will be posted as a stand-alone post. The oilprice article links to the most recent IEA report, titled Key World Energy Statistics, 2020. Bottom line: the headline over at Oilprice says it all. Archived.

Housing surge yet to come: this is an interesting article from The WSJ: coronavirus has left banks with lots of cash and little to do with it. One way to "spend" all that money: residential real estate.

Dow 30: all things being equal, one would assume the index would be down today simply because the index is price-weighted and AAPL has dropped from $500/share to $125/share overnight. That will affect the Dow, but it won't affect value of AAPL, per se.