Focus On Fracking — May 28, 2023

Locator: 44790FRACKING.

Link.

From the link, the lede:

• largest draw from US oil supplies in 80 months;
• lowest May gasoline supplies since 2014; 
• distillates supplies at 1 year low 
• Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a new 39½ year low after largest draw from US oil supplies since Labor Day 2016, 

US oil prices finished higher for a second week following 4 straight weekly declines, on a big jump in gasoline demand and on the largest drawdown of commercial oil supplies since Thanksgiving…

... after rising 2.1% to $71.55 per barrel last week on hopes for a debt ceiling deal as Canadian oil supplies were reduced by widespread wildfires, the contract price for the benchmark US light sweet crude for June delivery fell 1% in Asian trading early Monday as continuing uncertainty about the safety of US public debt led oil traders to avoid risks, but rebounded Monday morning in New York after US House Speaker McCarthy said debt ceiling negotiations had been productive, and settled 44 cents higher at $71.99 a barrel as traders balanced concerns over supply disruptions in Canada and Iraq against the potential risk of U.S. defaulting on its debt, as trading in the June oil contract expired…

Alberta — UCP — May 29, 2023

Locator: 44789CANADA.

Tracking the race. Link here.

 And:

Josh Young.

49 - 38. Not final but very, very close.

Majority: 44. 

Amazing NDP even gets double digit(s). Sad.

It appears it all came down to oil vs free health care. Pretty simplistic, I know.

But that’s how I remember things. Right, wrong, or indifferent.

Miami Heat — Denver Nuggets — May 29, 2023

Locator: 44788SPORTS.
Locator: 44788BUD.

TNT post-game is still best post-game analysis — in any sport. Inside The NBA.

Dallas Stars lose conference championship. 6 - 0 tonight. Dallas did extend it to six games.

Back to TNT: Bud Lite is front and center on the set. Charles Barkley: Bud Lite fan right now! Said it clearly and seriously. Good for him!

Now, on to NCAA Division men’s baseball: screwiest system. Link here. Vanderbilt seeded sixth, nationally. 

Brackets

Personal Note -- May 29, 2023

Locator: 44787COVID.  

Without going into details, an immediate family member became symptomatic overnight and tested positive for Covid-19. 

Not Sophia. Or my wife. Or me.

Fully vaccinated: says either four or five vaccinations -- and based on dates, probably had all five that were available. Even though might not have met the age criteria for the fifth dose.

The family member is well below the age of 65 and well above the age of 16.

Quite symptomatic including "central nervous system" symptoms, but not yet hospitalized.

Confirmed -- laboratory-proven -- positive. Next question: Paxlovid?

Family member just got the diagnosis in the last fifteen minutes. 

For the record: both my wife and I have had the primary (two injections) with three "boosters" = five altogether. For me:

• first: 5/29/2021
• most recent: 10/7/22

My wife plans to get her next booster "soon." I will wait until the "annual" comes out later this year which will probably "have" a single strain, the X.BB.1.16 (link here). Medicare covers the vaccine if one meets the criteria.

Tesla Statistics -- May 29, 2023

Locator: 44786EVS.  
Locator: 44786TSLA.  

Link here.

Best-selling car in the world in 2023? The Model Y.

Whatever happened to the Model E (as in Model S, Model E, Model X, Model Y)?

Link here.

A reader got me started on this, thank you very much. My not-ready-for-prime-time reply:

I have never invested in Tesla but, now, looking at the statistics, one wonders if it might be something for the portfolio when looking 30 years out.

It's P/E ratio is down to less than 60.

Small rivals will die with high interest rates.

Ford and Tesla seem to be partnering.

That supercharger deal was huge for both F and TSLA.

My hunch: the TSLA supercharger becomes the standard across the US. Maybe the world.

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.

All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. 

Again, all my posts are done quickly. There will be typographical and content errors in all my posts. If any of my posts are important to you, go to the source.

Deserves A Stand-Alone Post -- May 20, 2023

Locator: 44785COAL. 

This article interested me. Not. At. All. 

Anyone "surprised" by this story is a nominee for the annual Geico Rock Award.

Dog-bites-man story.

But one data point jumped out at me. Truly amazing.

I don't care about the data point from an emissions point of view.

I don't care about the data point from a political point of view.

I don't care about the data point from an investment point of view.

I only "care about" the data point as a data point that reflects the energy demand of China and what that means going forward.

And then we have India.

 The data point -- okay, there were three data points, I guess, that caught my attention:

Deserves A Stand-Alone Post -- May 20, 2023

Locator: 44784NATGAS. 

From a reader this morning, thank you very, very, very much.

Link to MSN.

My not-ready-for-prime-time reply:

Wow, if that holds up, that's huge (my advice: the developer needs to have equipment in place today, and start laying pipe the minute President Biden signs the bill).

Here's what a lot of folks forget. This debt ceiling deal will probably be a thousand pages thick and that's before we get to all the "spin-offs."

The press can only hit the high points and the press generally only hits the top-line, headline, contentious issues because they have only so much time and "space" to get the story out (and they all have an agenda).

But hidden in those thousand of pages there has to be a lot of goodies to get US congress-people to support it. Imagine what McCarthy got for some of his more recalcitrant GOP MAGA politicos. If they want to go on record to vote against the bill to put social security recipients at risk, let them go for it. [Biden continues to impress me. Don't take that out of context; one needs to know from where "we" started this journey. Seriously: would you rather have Joe and Jill or Harry and Meghan or Barack and Michelle or The Donald and Melania in the White House? For me, the choice is easy and obvious.] 

The "401(k)" is a great example of big, big "things" hidden in massive bills.

I bet a lot of politicos wish the debt ceiling issue would come up more often. LOL. 

Deserves A Stand-Alone Post -- May 20, 2023

Locator: 44783GEO.

Wow, how I love the US and the military. 

I'm not sure there's a better book on "the US and the military in combat" than Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. More on that later, perhaps. When I saw the "story" below, I immediately thought of Maj General Cummings and the invasion of Anopopei, south Pacific, early days of WWII.

From a reader, this morning, thank you very much, link here.

I'm getting a bit tired of Matt Gaetz, et al.

From the ZeroHedge article:

The map:

Investing -- May 29, 2023

NOT YET PROOFREAD. There will be typographical and content errors.

Locator:10005INV. 

WTI: continues to melt up. US holiday. WTI up 1%; up 73 cents; trading at $73.40.

Investing. Spend some time "digesting" this graphic. Link here.

From the linked article:

The U.S. stock market is surprisingly calm right now, especially in the face of the debt-ceiling fight. A key reason: a growing divide between mainstream investors, who have largely been sitting out the 2023 stock rally, and the machines whose buying has been driving it.

Only days remain until the U.S. blows past its debt-ceiling deadline. On Saturday, President Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a tentative agreement to prevent a destabilizing default. But passage of the plan, which is expected to face opposition from some House conservatives this week, isn’t yet assured. [If all Democrats support the deal, as is expected, only five Republicans need to support the deal. The WSJ suggests McCarthy got the better deal; "everyone" else says otherwise. -- That's my take. ]

Despite the political uncertainty, the rebounding stock market has barely gotten nicked, with the S&P 500 finishing 0.3% higher last week. Over recent months, stocks have handily overcome stress in the banking system, stubborn inflation and interest-rate hikes. Last year, those kinds of issues repeatedly torpedoed stocks. This year, markets have met such events with a shrug.

The market’s steady rise has puzzled analysts and portfolio managers as the S&P 500 has churned more than 9% higher this year (and the technology-focused Nasdaq Composite has risen 24%). One explanation: Quant funds, or those relying on computer models and automated trading, have been doubling down on equity markets as other investors have stepped back, citing high valuations and concerns about the likely course of the U.S. economy.

Quant-fund buying has pushed these funds’ net exposure to U.S. stocks to the highest level since December 2021, according to data from Deutsche Bank. Mainstream investors, in contrast, have been pulling cash from stock funds and pouring it into money markets.

The continuing demand from quants has provided a lifeline for the stock market. Combined with robust corporate buybacks, their buying has helped counteract selling pressure and led to placid moves. The S&P 500, for example, has moved less than 1% in either direction for 36 of the last 46 sessions, according to Dow Jones Market Data, the quietest 46-day stretch since December 2021.

Much more at the link, of course.

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Chips

Link here. 

A reminder, before we get started. The Nvidia story was a ten-year story in the making; it was not an overnight investing opportunity.

From he linked article:

The artificial-intelligence revolution is being likened by Google’s chief executive to humanity’s harnessing of fire. Now if only the industry could secure the digital kindling to fuel it.

A shortage of the kind of advanced chips that are the lifeblood of new generative AI systems has set off a race to lock down computing power and find workarounds. The graphics chips, or GPUs, used for AI are almost all made by Nvidia. But the boom in demand for them has far outpaced supply with the viral success of ChatGPT, a chatbot that is able to respond to questions in humanlike ways.

“Because there is a shortage, it’s about who you know,” said Sharon Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Lamini, a startup that helps companies build AI models like chatbots. “It’s like toilet paper during the pandemic.”

That situation has restricted the processing power that cloud-service providers like Amazon.com and Microsoft can offer to clients such as OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. AI developers need the server capacity to develop and operate their increasingly complex models and help other companies build AI services.

Even the most connected tech entrepreneurs in the world are struggling to secure capacity. During a May 16 congressional hearing on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it would be better if fewer people used ChatGPT because of the processor bottleneck.

“GPUs at this point are considerably harder to get than drugs,” Elon Musk told The Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit on May 23.

Being Musk has its perks, though. Earlier this year, startups clamoring for Oracle computing capacity were abruptly told that a buyer had snapped up much of Oracle’s spare server space, people familiar with the matter said. The buyer, the startups were told, was Musk, who is building his own OpenAI rival called X.AI.

Access to tens of thousands of advanced graphics chips is crucial for companies training large AI models that can generate original text and analysis. Without them, work on the large language models that are behind the AI runs much slower, founders say. Nvidia’s advanced graphic chips excel at doing lots of computations simultaneously, which is crucial for AI work.

Much more at the link, of course. 

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Previously Posted

Locator: 44766INV.  
Locator: 44766AAPL.  

Emperor with no clothes. Link here.

******************************

Ouch: Nvidia short sellers lose $2.3 billion in one day. Link here.

“Our expectations for NVDA’s future revenues are lifting substantially,” Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson wrote in a note upgrading Nvidia to outperform from neutral. He pushed his price target to $490, implying an additional roughly 29% in upside for shares from Wednesday’s close.

Someone else noticed the same thing, link here.

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.

All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. 

Again, all my posts are done quickly. There will be typographical and content errors in all my posts. If any of my posts are important to you, go to the source.

Happy Memorial Day -- May 29, 2023

Locator:1001MEM2023.

I want to break free! Link here.

Remembrance: for my maternal grandfather who spent much of the war -- WWI -- in a French hospital recovering from the Spanish flu. No pathogen was ever identified and no vaccine was ever developed. In four months:

Interruption of spread:

• Spanish flu: absolutely no ability to interrupt the spread;
• Covid-19: we'll never know how important interrupting the spread of Covid-19 was to preventing a Spanish flu redux

Covid-19 response: I flip-flop on this all the time, but at the end of the day, as Covid-19 recedes into the background, every day I become more positively impressed with how policy makers handled this epidemic, now a pandemic. The numbers remain incomprehensible (these are just the confirmed cases):

Three stories from The WSJ this morning. These are all behind a paywall, of course. I'll expand on them later, particularly the first two -- investing and chips.

• investing;
• chips; and,
• Orlando. AOC and RDS have a lot in common. Ideology trumps jobs.

Peter Zeihan newsletter. E-mail campaign archive. 

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Portland, Oregon CityFair

Rose Festival / CityFair. Link here.

Price per carnival ride: about $6 / person / ride.

Total daily cost:

A family of four visiting CityFair for a day could spend, on the lower end, about $135 to $170 or more. The lower end of the price estimate does not include any spending on souvenirs and only accounts for about one carnival ride per person.

Disneyland California:

Both are LGBQT-friendly, Portland, maybe, more so.