The Mother Of All Hostile Takeovers -- The New Chairman Of The Board And CEO Will Replace All Directors, Ukraine, Inc -- February 24, 2022

Breaking news. No link yet. 

The question, of course, is whether Ukraine will remain independent as a wholly owned subsidiary or will it be swallowed into the holding company. 

Next: by the way, if one reads Putin's writings regarding Ukraine over the years, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians may want to consider buying some foreign real estate or putting down a deposit on a German/Polish rental. Just saying. My calendar suggests they have a three-year window of opportunity, at most. 

Moldova: world's largest ammunition depot? Needs to be fact-checked. Russia to take it? Later: Hawthorne Army Depot, Nevada: world's largest ammunition depot. Moldova's Cobasna ammunition depot is "said" to be the largest in eastern Europe. Multiple sources. Fact-checked with my wife. In addition, it is very likely much of the Cobasna depot is out-of-date, in-op, WWII-era ammunition.

Ukraine sanctions:

EU, UK, and US will buy almost $1 billion worth of crude oil and natural gas from Russia every day for the foreseeable future. Link here.

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In Other News

Backwardation: new record high for six-month futures -- $11.55 / bbl. Again, futures: not what oil will cost in the future, but what folks are willing to pay TODAY to guarantee crude oil delivery for some date in the future. Think of it as "hedging."

It's no different that buying an airline ticket in January for that July flight to Disneyland, or buying that same ticket on July first. Sure, there's a possibility that flights will be on sale in July, but not very likely.

Crude oil futures here.

• for oil guaranteed to be delivered six months from now, folks are willing to pay, Aug 2022: $88
• for delivery one year from now, February, 2023: $83.
• for delivery eighteen months from now, August 2023: $78
  

SRE: 4Q21 earnings preview, link here.

• Sempra is scheduled to announce Q4 earnings results TOMORROW, Friday, February 25th, before market open.
• The consensus EPS Estimate is $2.00 (+5.3% Y/Y) and the consensus Revenue Estimate is $3.52B (+11.0% Y/Y).
• Over the last 2 years, SRE has beaten EPS estimates 88% of the time and has beaten revenue estimates 38% of the time.

EU EV charging rates: link here. Getting out of control. Why should this be a surprise?

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Commentary

Two pipelines pretty much define the Biden energy policy:

• Nord Stream 2
• Keystone XL

Two countries pretty much define the Biden foreign policy:

• Afghanistan
• Ukraine

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Word For The Day: Lychrel

From wiki:

A Lychrel number is a natural number that cannot form a palindrome through the iterative process of repeatedly reversing its digits and adding the resulting numbers. 

This process is sometimes called the 196-algorithm, after the most famous number associated with the process. 

In base ten, no Lychrel numbers have been yet proved to exist, but many, including 196, are suspected on heuristic and statistical grounds. 

The name "Lychrel" was coined by Wade Van Landingham as a rough anagram of "Cheryl", his girlfriend's first name.

This is the mathematician's answer to "Wordle":

About 80% of all numbers under 10,000 resolve into a palindrome in four or fewer steps; about 90% of those resolve in seven steps or fewer. Here are a few examples of non-Lychrel numbers:

• 56 becomes palindromic after one iteration: 56+65 = 121.
• 57 becomes palindromic after two iterations: 57+75 = 132, 132+231 = 363.
• 59 becomes a palindrome after three iterations: 59+95 = 154, 154+451 = 605, 605+506 = 1111
• 89 takes an unusually large 24 iterations (the most of any number under 10,000 that is known to resolve into a palindrome) to reach the palindrome 8,813,200,023,188.