Winter Storm Slams Texas -- January 31, 2022

Breaking: WTI now well over $88.00

Now, back to regular programming.

More federal money for North Dakota: North Dakota will receive up to $40 million to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells. Whoo-hoo! It appears only seven states will receive more than North Dakota, but not only is ND in the top seven or eight, it is also at the high end of federal money being disbursed. Link when I get it. Arrived in my e-mail from Department of Interior.

From the department:

The Department of the Interior today announced $1.15 billion in funding is available to states from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to create jobs cleaning up orphaned oil and gas wells across the country. This is a key initiative of President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which allocated a total of $4.7 billion to create a new federal program to address orphan wells. Millions of Americans across the country live within a mile of an orphaned oil and gas well.

Orphaned wells are polluting backyards, recreation areas, and public spaces across the country. The historic investments to clean up these hazardous sites will create good-paying, union jobs, catalyze economic growth and revitalization, and reduce dangerous methane leaks.

“President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is enabling us to confront the legacy pollution and long-standing environmental injustices that for too long have plagued underrepresented communities,” said Secretary Deb Haaland. “We must act with urgency to address the more than one hundred thousand documented orphaned wells across the country and leave no community behind. This is good for our climate, for the health our communities, and for American workers.” 

Plugging orphaned wells will also help advance the goals of the U.S. Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan, as well as the Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, which focuses on spurring economic revitalization in the hard-hit energy communities.

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Winter Storm Slams Texas

I keep reading all those news stories that a winter storm slammed Texas. 

Well, here's the video.

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The Market -- For The Archives

Wow, talk about an afternoon surge. After a slow start this morning, the market is now taking off. I guess mom-and-pop investors are not worried about the Fed raising the rate from 0.00000% to 0.25% or whatever they think it will be. 

My favorite chart:

Link here.

Updated through November 30, 2021. Still at record highs and trending higher. 

XLNX: wow. I've accumulated XLNX for decades. Today, I just happened to see it jumped $13, up over 7%, now trading about $191. This is still not a 52-week high. I wonder how much of this is due to a short squeeze. I think a lot of folks got burned on this one assuming the merger would not take place, after the Chinese delayed it. AMD is up almost $8.

Oil: "all" oil stocks are up.

Commodities are up: SCCO, FCX

AAPL: after soaring last week, up $12/share (?), AAPL is up another $3 / share today after a slow start.

PLUG: is up $2.76 on a $21 stock. Whoo-hoo!

It's hard to find anything that's trading down. If so, pretty much profit taking after recent jump in price. Even EPD is up a bit. LOL. What's ENB doing? Up nicely. EPD reports tomorrow, February 1, 2022, before market open; forecast, 54 cents EPS; "whisper number" is 57 cents.

Holy mackerel, NVDA is up $13. 

SBUX: I've never invested in SBUX and the company if facing a lot of headwinds but I need to diversity out of energy, and I'm seriously thinking of looking at SBUX. I'll wait to see what Jim Cramer has to say this evening. SBUX reports earnings at 5:00 a.m. ET tomorrow morning (February 1, 2022); forecast, 79 cents EPS. The "whisper number" is 82 cents.

ARKK: must be having an incredible day ... let's check ... yup, up 8%. 

S&P 500: up 83 points. Remember, under the 10:1 rule, this would equate to an 800 point jump in the Dow today; just saying.  

Dow: regardless, the Dow was up a remarkable 400 points. Go back and look at my favorite chart.

I'm posting this for the archives for the grandsons and their mother who will end up managing the portfolio after I die. At 75 years of age, I turn the portfolio over to our younger daughter. The twins will be in first or second grade by then, home schooled, majoring in the "3-R's" with a minor in business and investing.  

Prediction: the S&P 500 will hit 4,500 before it hits 4,600.

Note: the above companies fascinate me. I own shares in some but not all. I've been in and out of some of them over the years.  

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.

Fast Money:

• dead cat bounce; expect more volatility; expect to test lows again;
• one day of trading doesn't change the tone of the market; still going to go back down
• sigh of relief, but that's all; be skeptical; last day of the month; simply buying bargains in an over-sold bargain;
• they all sound like "market timers" to me; not long-term investors;
• panelist agrees: this is a "trading show"; not an investing show;
• wow, talk about a lot of "Debbie Downers."
• something tells me Jim Cramer will have a different take;
• so they start off with: ARKK; TSLA; ZOOM;, Teladoc; Roku; none of them on my radar scope, though I did go off the reservation last year and started a position in ARKK; sold before end of year;
• and, then having said that, one of the panelists is bullish on Teladoc;
• another one? Trimble
• another one? Palantir
• it seems if one is willing to go down that road; there are a lot better companies to look at;
• enough of this; moving on; next up, Mad Money

Mad Money:

• unlike the Fast Money folks, Jim Cramer makes a case for a bull market for most commodities, and the S&P
• I agree with Jim Cramer's "case" for a bull market, but with a huge pullback, probably during the summer 
• Cramer never mentioned the mid-term elections but hard to believe we would see a recession prior to the mid-terms
  

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Jason Day And The Early Morning Club

From The WSJ: 

I’m writing this column at 4 a.m., but I need to level with you: It’s nowhere near as romantic as that sounds. I am not sitting in a hotel lobby, tuxedo bow tie unfurled, cigar smoldering in an ashtray, pecking at an old Underwood typewriter after a long night out with movie stars, rock gods and other assorted fabulous people.

The truth is I fell asleep last night right after reading to my kids. I passed out shortly before 9 p.m. with a copy of “Friendship According to Humphrey,” about a class pet hamster trying to adapt to a new frog in the room, resting atop my chest. (It’s a fun read. Humphrey is adorbs.)

I’m awake because over the past two years, I’ve joined a new club: the very, very early morning club. I know a lot of people have lives and jobs that require them to wake up extremely early, but this is a new lifestyle for me. It took two small children and one pandemic that kept us all home to figure out that if I was going to continue to be productive, and write nonsense humor columns like this one, I was going to need to be productive at an uncommon hour, sitting alone in the dark. 

I'll expand on this later. 

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Book Recommendation

Again, if interested in origin of solar system, earth, fossil fuel, origin of life, this is currently the best new book on the market right now for armchair/amateur biologists, geologists, fossil fuel aficionados. 

• How The Mountains Grew
• John Dvorak
• c. 2021
• Pegasus Books, August 2021

From the book, pages 145 - 147:

The Permian: why did so much oil accumulate in such a small region of the continent?

• Burial of phytoplankton and zooplankton, often cyanobacteria or foraminifera -
• buried in mud and silt; anaerobic (sealed off from oxygen); sealed off from decomposition by bacteria; the organic matter would change chemically into a waxy substance known as kerogen
  if burial continues; kerogen would turn into oil
• the deeper the sediment, the higher the temperature, the move from natural gas to oil
• the sweet spot in temperature, the "oil window," is between 140° and 250° Fahrenheit which corresponds to a burial range of five thousand to twenty thousand fee.
• but it must be trapped: impermeable rock layers of salt or gypsum or similar material
• the Permian Basin met those conditions,and it me them multiple times
• most oil-rich regions ahve one or two places in the rock sequence (strata, formations, subformations)
• the Bakken has a dozen +/-
  in the Permian Basin there are eleven such strata 
• Midland:
• multiple "plays" in the Wolfcamp Shale or the Bone Springs Formation
• if it these multiple oil plays that gives West Texas the distinction of having one of the largest -- if not the largest -- reservoir in the world
• which raises the next question: why were these conditions met multiple times in the Permian Basin?
• the answer: it was a consequence of the collision of Euramerica and Gondwana and the formation of the supercontinent, Pangea.

To be continued in a future blog.