Investors: March 3, 2022

First group "financial / economic" indicators:

• 10-Year Treasury: link here. Yield: 1.858%.
  
• DXY: link here. $97.63; hardly earth-shattering.
  
• Silver: link here. Up another 1.3%. Over $25 again.
  
• Gold: link here. Will we hit $2,000? Up $7; now trading at $1,936.
  
• CBOE volatility index: link here. Explained at Investopedia. Not nosebleed levels -- yet: 31.18. It's been as high as 36 in the past few months.
• CAD to USD: not getting any worse for Canada; holding its own; chart here.

Oil:

• WTI: up 3.54%; up $3.91; trading at $114.50.
• Brent: p 3.58%; up $4.04; trading at $117.00.

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.  

Russia: this Ukraine thing is going to be much bigger than anyone can imagine. For a country with such a small economy, it sure has a way of impacting everything. When you get right down to it, it's not the country, it's the oligarchs. Just think, had Putin not done this, he could have started the Moscow Golf Association, teaming up with Phil Mickelson and Donald Trump.  

UNP: the stock I'm most interested in today? UNP. After that huge run-up yesterday, will it be able to hold off profit-taking? If it remains flat or slightly green, I will be quite impressed.

KO: the one major change I've made in my life in the past year -- I no longer drink Coca-Cola, no soft drinks for that matter. My go-to drink is now orange juice. Interestingly enough orange juice seemed so much more expensive than Coca-Cola but it's not. Very, very strange. And wow, it's a thirst-quencher. Awesome. This has nothing to do with Covid or a health kick. It started with looking for a complement for my coffee at breakfast and before I knew it, was the drink for any mean, any snack. It helps that Target is just a block away and I can bike / walk whenever to get another bottle of orange juice. 

OKE: did anyone else notice that OKE surged over 5% yesterday? Still pays 5.86%. It's hard to believe Warren Buffett can't find any good bargains. 

AAPL: most bullish indicator today? If AAPL can actually have two back-to-back "green" days. This $200-stock is still trading at $166. March 8, 2022, is its spring event and y'all are all invited.

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The Battery Life

Why all those EV-battery "breakthroughs" aren't breaking through: The WSJ. 

I doubt anyone has followed the EV battery story more closely than I have. So, I don't even have to read the linked story to know what this is all about, but I'm curious: did Christopher Mims get it right? Did he follow the science? It's all about the Periodic Table and electrons. Period. Dot. 

I was disappointed. He took a completely different approach. But still a good article. My favorite paragraph in that article:

While it’s easy to create a battery in the lab that performs well by one measure, the way such results are reported is often a kind of sleight-of-hand, says Ms. Hamilton. Such reports tend to play down the fact that a real-world battery must perform well by at least a half-dozen different measures that matter for electric vehicles. Those include delivering power for acceleration, storing a lot of energy per gram of weight to enable long range, lasting for thousands of charge and discharge cycles, operating in a wide range of temperatures, and not catching fire too easily when damaged.

By the way, not catching fire too easily when damaged. Helloooo -- they don't even have to be damaged to catch fire. Ask hundreds of Chevy Bolt owners, and, recall the ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean caring thousands of EVs -- spontaneous combustion.

At the end of the day, these were the takeaways from the linked WSJ article:

• there won't be any breakthroughs in battery technology
• improved technology is mostly about keeping the batteries from self-immolation.

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The Good Life

Yesterday one of the maintenance folks for the apartment complex came up to the apartment to fix a very, very minor problem.

Jaime was de Mexico but spoke very, very good English. He mentioned that he was having a busy, busy day, with much to do. I replied lo siento, I was sorry to hear that. LOL. 

He asked me if I spoke Spanish (LOL, he was being kind; no, I don't speak Spanish). I told him Sophia and I were studying Spanish together through Duolingo.

He laughed. He said he was learning English through Duolingo. 

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It's Going To Be A Great Day

I walked Sophia to the bus stop.

I will drive Olivia to high school.

I saw a juvenile / adolescent cardinal this morning.

A trifecta for a great day.