Notes From All Over -- The Investors' Edition -- July 15, 2021

Tractor Supply (TSC): up nicely today. 

BK: increases its dividend. Whoo-hoo. Had been 31 cents for eight consecutive quarters. Will increase dividend by ten percent to 34 cents and authorizes repurchase of $6 billion of common stock.

Ten-year treasury watch: yield = 1.37% or thereabouts. Early this morning, the yield "flash-dropped" to 1.25%.

AAPL watch: closer to $150 than $149. But that is changing minute-to-minute today. Later: drops below $149.

• makes controversial changes to Safari in iOS 15.

Bolt: GM tells Chevy Bolt owners park it outside and away from structures. Link here. 

Saudi: self-reporting -- its crude production rose by 383K bpd month-over-month, to slightly less than 9 million bopd. Link here. 

Meme stocks:

• Melvin and Mapleland, The Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2021;
• Melvin Capital, The Wall Street Journal,  January 31, 2021;

Morgan Stanley: doubles dividend and makes notable stock buyback announcement. Unusual for a bank.

Virgin Galactic: plunges. Link here. Posted yesterday, the freefall. Due to announcement that Virgin says it will authorize new stock equity sale. 

Oman: link to Simon Watkins.

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Covid-19 -- The Japanese Olympics

From The LA Times:

Japan’s COVID cases rise as Olympics near

In a week, the now anachronistically named Tokyo 2020 Olympics will finally get underway.

It’s a moment Japan has long been preparing for — since March of last year when the Games were pushed back because of the pandemic; since 2016, when Japan’s then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took the baton from Rio de Janeiro in a Super Mario get-up; since 2013, when the country first clinched its hard-fought bid.

Even so, the country heads into the Olympics with a resignation and a reckoning over how leaders handled a pandemic marring what should be a marquee moment for national pride. Many Japanese are thinking less about races and gold medals than the fact that Tokyo is in a fourth state of emergency. COVID-19 infections are again on the rise, and supply problems have stalled a vaccination program.

With a week to go until the opening ceremony and fears the highly infectious Delta variant will bring more danger, less than a third of Japan’s 120 million people have received one dose of the vaccine, and less than 20% are fully inoculated.

The best-case scenario the Japanese public can hope for is an uneventful Games that ends with the country — and the world — not much worse off than going into it. Hardly an Olympian aspiration.