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Saturday, July 1, 2023

NOG Acquires More Acreage In The Delaware Basin -- Forge Assets -- Vital Energy -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 44866B.

This deal was closed at the "end of June, 2023."

I can't recall if this has been previously posted.

This was from May 16, 2023:

Northern Oil and Gas, Inc. have announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire a 30 percent undivided stake in the Forge Assets in the Delaware Basin, in partnership with Vital Energy, Inc., for a purchase price net to NOG of $162.0 million in cash, subject to typical closing adjustments.
The Acquired Assets are primarily located in Ward and Reeves Counties, Texas and include approximately 10,200 net acres, 30.5 net producing wells, 2.3 net wells-in-process and ~20 low-breakeven net undeveloped locations. 

Key words: NOG, Delaware Basin, Forge Assets, Vital Energy.

$162 million / 10,200 net acres = $1,600 / acre.

Left Coast Or Right Coast -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 44865INV. 

Flashback: refresh your memory. Take a look at this 1960s fixer-upper on the market for $35 million; on a lake that you may not be able to reach in the winter; and whose water level may be so low in the spring, the lake can't float your boat until late June. The house:

Plastic awning -- note the lights. At the link one can see the hummingbird feeder.

Pre-fab?

 
 
Now compare that offering with this offering (see below) on the other side of the country where socialists live and where Phil Jackson travels to see the tree leaves change color in the autumn. 
 
The "above" offering, $35 million; the offering shown below, $26 million.
 







So much more at the link.

For Investors Only -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 44864INV. 

Dividends: link here.

June 28, 2023: three 5G stocks to target for triple-digit returns in 2023. Link here.

  • QCOM
  • AVGO
  • SWKS

June 15, 2023: top 25 high dividend stocks yielding 4% to 10%. Link here. Of the first ten mentioned, the ones that interest me:

  • Enbridge
  • ATT
  • Kinder Morgan

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.

AAPL Ads -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 44863AAPL. 

Link here.



First Phase Of Apple's New North Carolina Campus -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 10099AAPL. 

Links:

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North Carolina Campus

Link here



Apple -- The Cheese Grater, The Desktop, The Laptop -- An Update -- June 29, 2023

Locator: 44861AAPL. 

Links:

  • Apple (AAPL): link here.
    • Towers, desktops, and laptops: link here.
    • iPhone: link here.
  • Vision Pro: link here.
    • Spatial computing.
  • Vision silicon: link here.

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The Tower, The iMac, And The MacBooks

Updates

June 27, 2023: MacPro's biggest problem: the MacBook, The Verge, June 27, 2023.

Original Post 

June 27, 2023: a 30-inch display?

The Market -- July 1, 2023

 Locator: 44859INV. 

If investors -- especially those investors overweight in the NASDAQ -- aren't nervous after Friday, June 30, 2023, they need to be. 

Or maybe not.

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.

Link here.

The 2024 Presidential Race Will Be Tracked Here

 Locator: 44858POL.

Updates

July 10, 2023: And his supporters appear not to care about obstruction of justice at all -- if they don't care, why should any of the rest of us care? Crickets.


July 5, 2023: Biden goes silent at key moments. A great virtue to have. Trump never able to "constrain / contain" himself. Walk quietly, carry a big stick seems to work better.

July 1, 2023: four swing states.

  • Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.

If California Can Mandate EVs Standards, Texas Can Mandate Supercharger Standards -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 44857EVS. 

From Reuters today:

My suggestion: let's see what Buc-ee's does.

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Gotta Say It

His future just got a whole lot bleaker.

I was swimming in the pool last night. I got to spend quite a bit of time with one of Sophia's best friends. Sophia was not swimming with me; she was out and about with her immediate family.

This particular friend is a male and will be going into fifth grade in less than two months. He is absolutely the nicest kid in the world, the sweetest kid, as they say. Sophia is going into the fourth grade, same school, and she could not have a more loyal friend. They sit together on the bus and though there are absolutely no problems on the bus (no bullying, for example), and though Sophia could take care of herself if there were any problems, C_____ would be there to protect her.

We've known C____ for two, maybe three years now. He must have been one of the cutest babies ever. 

Over the past year or so he has matured nicely and gets more handsome as the days go by. 

He has so much fun in the pool; he has fun with everyone. Always laughing, always smiling. I see his mom on occasion; she has another child, who is eight months old, also cute as a button, wearing floaties and learning to swim, despite the fact that his mother does not like the water, and, she, herself, has never learned to swim, and is probably self-conscious about being in the pool.

My heart goes out to C____. He has two, maybe three more wonderful years to live. In three years reality will hit.

C_______'s future is very, very bleak. He just doesn't know it yet. His mom may. But if so, she will keep it to herself. She, too, is on the cusp.

I have never seen C_____'s father or, in fact, any man in C______'s life. It appears he is being raised in a nice apartment complex by a single mom. My hunch: they move to a much less expensive apartment complex within two years, and in the process, will probably move out of one of the best school districts in Texas. His teachers will quickly forget him; those same teachers will likely never forget Sophia. 

Sophia looks just like her teachers. C________ does not.

As bleak as C_________'s future was a week ago, his future became much, much bleaker after this week.

My heart really, really goes out to C____________.

The EIA Misstatements Now Catching The Attention Of Mainstream Media -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 44856WTI. 

And so we begin.

Every week, for as long as I can remember, the author / writer / webmaster of "Focus On Fracking" has inserted the following (same) paragraph near the top of the blog, but simply updated the data each week (I broke the paragraph up int bite-size pieces):

So, based on that reported & estimated data, the crude oil figures provided by the EIA for the week ending June 16th appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports, from storage, and from oilfield production was 1,859,000 barrels per day less than what our oil refineries reported they used during the week…
To account for that obvious disparity between the apparent supply of oil and the apparent disposition of it, the EIA just inserted a [ +1,859.000 ] barrel per day figure onto line 13 of the weekly U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet in order to make the reported data for the daily supply of oil and for the consumption of it balance out, a fudge factor that they label in their footnotes as “unaccounted for crude oil”, thus suggesting there was an error in the week’s oil supply & demand figures that we have just transcribed...
However, since most oil traders respond to these weekly EIA reports as if they were accurate, and since these weekly figures therefore often drive oil pricing, and hence decisions to drill or complete oil wells, we’ll continue to report this data just as it's published, and just as it's watched & believed to be reasonably reliable by most everyone in the industry...
(for more on how this weekly oil data is gathered, and the possible reasons for that “unaccounted for” oil, see this EIA explainer)….(NB: there is also a more recent twitter thread from an EIA administrator addressing these errors, and what they hope to do about it).

I've highlighted that on a couple of occasions, but now "others" are finally seeing the same thing and starting to report it.

It has, all of a sudden, become a big and visible issue over at social media by some very respected writers for some very respected media outlets. 

The EIA has become quite egregious in some of their reporting. It clearly has "an agenda." At best, more and more folks won't trust the EIA data. At worst, this lack of trust and egregious reporting will lead to increased volatility in the price of oil.

For twenty years (or more), I've been waiting for a breakout in the price of oil and for oil demand to be a bigger issue than oil supply, but I've yet to see it.

Again, we are being told that the second half of 2023 will finally be the "year" that oil breaks out as global oil supply significantly "fails" to meet demand.

So, we'll see.

Over at twitter, the current state of affairs regarding the EIA reporting. Javier Blas is among the best analysts and among the most credible on twitter. One ignores him at one's own peril. At the link, it's an interesting thread.

T Maintains Dividend -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 44855INV. 

Analysts have pretty much been divided on this one: whether ATT (T) can maintain its dividend.

T just declared it's most recent quarterly dividend and it maintained its dividend. This dividend will "never" be increased and could very well be cut.

I use T to park cash while waiting to allocate new dollars into the market, which I do the second and fourth week every month (though the fourth week allotment often happens in the first week of the following month due to the vagaries of dividend payments, but I digress.

I use T because it's cheap per share (at $15, a $10-dividend seems to go farther, LOL) and a dividend of 7% is not trivial. I don't always collect the dividend, for obvious reasons.

This will be the last quarter that I use T to park cash. 

Next quarter I will probably switch to something like ENB, currently paying 7% also, but less likely to cut its dividend. DVN, paying over 9%, might even be a better choice. (Yahoo!Finance numbers not always current.)

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.

EVs -- Mid-Year Review -- June, 2023

Locator: 44854EVS. 

In my mid-year review, I state the following:

EVs

the universal supercharger plug: Tesla NACS

  • Tesla owns it
  • all other supercharging networks will fold by 2025

transition: adoption of EVs will not unfold as expected

  • RIDE: darling of Wall Street declared bankruptcy
  • #1 global brand: 2Q23 deliveries to be announced shortly; will provide clearer picture
  • more and more, EVs seen for elites; very, very expensive
  • once one has an EV, one thinks about re-charging 24/7; the issue lives in one's mind rent-free
  • we should start seeing stories on repeat buyers; used EVs for sale: won't be a pretty picture
  • for 90% of Americans, switching to an EV is a bridge too far

Let's take a look at just how accurate these two statement are

  • more and more, EVs seen for elites; very, very expensive
  • once one has an EV, one thinks about re-charging 24/7; the issue lives in one's mind rent-free

From The WSJ, two days ago:

  • the 2024 Dodge Hornet R/T
  • "made for America" -- actually not: made for California
  • a plug-in hybrid -- which I think are even less popular than "full" EVs
  • they're not even "real" EVs;
  • purpose of automobile:
    • an anchor baby
    • helping Stellantis meet fuel-economy and air-quality numbers in California
  • price
    • writer considers it "pricey" -- that's an under-statement
    • base price: $40,935
    • price, as tested: $53,245
  • EPA fuel economy: 29 mpg combined (are you kidding me)
  • charging time: 2.5 hours (Level 2) -- are you kidding me
  • range: runs on gasoline when traveling cross-country; can charge overnight at hotels

bottom line:

  • $55,000 for a "KIA cross-over"?
  • produced to meet California requirements so Stellantis can sell their ICE cars in that state
  • hood ornament: less cachet than a Porsche, Mercedes, BWM

The reason their combined fuel mileage is 29 MPH (for a compact, yet):

If you have to ask, yes:

Monthly Utility Bill -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 44853TX.  

There's been a lot of talk about how hot Texas has been this past week. 

Unusual? Not.

In fact, much cooler than two years ago; it was just that last year was so cool by comparison.

Our utility bill (see below):

  • average temperature this past month: 90°F
  • average temperature same month two years ago: 96°F.

We made little effort to save energy this past month.

Our only utility bill is electricity.

No natural gas.

No EV.

Water bill so low, not worth noting. Essentially "free."

Biggest user: an old, old dryer, bought in 1993. Still has the Auburn Tigers magnet icon on it from when we lived in Alabama. Since then we have had the following addresses:

  • Prattville, AL: one address
  • San Antonio, TX: three addresses (three different homes over 13 years)
  • north Texas, Grapevine: two addresses
  • north Texas, Euless: present (one address)

Washer: new washer bought with dryer back in 1993;

  • finally conked out three years when damaged going up stairs while moving to new apartment; professional movers not very professional

Mid-Year Review -- June, 2023

Locator: 44852INV. 

Investing

The most under-reported story this past year: Nvidia

  • May, 2023: Nvidia joins the $1-trillion club
  • pivots from gaming (Covid-19 lockdown) to AI

trillion-dollar club

  • only eight on the list;
  • now:
    • #5: Saudi Aramco
    • #6: Nvidia
  • next year (2024):
    • #4 Nvidia
    • #6: Saudi Aramco
  • Meta does not move up the list, ever
  • Tesla could falter short term
  • of the trillion-dollar clubs, 
    • only a few are integrated vertically (AAPL) 
    • at least two highly dependent on ads
    • cloud services a major component of at least three
    • one is an outlier on so many levels
  • the darling of Wall Street and many mom-and-pop investors, this company has a market cap well less than $1 trillion; resting on laurels and legacy companies; thinks differently, and lately, wrongly
    • high point, March 25, 2022, has since dropped back; without AAPL, would have been dismal for investors
    • replaces bonds in 60/40 investing model
  • the next six trillion-dollar club members but could take years; when one looks at this list, it demonstrates just how dominant AAPL -- at $3 trillion -- is; in fact, companies now in $1-trillion club will lap the following:
    • two oil companies: CVX $300B), XOM ($400B)
    • one bank: JPM ($400B)
    • one Big Pharm: AstraZeneca
    • one is a lithium play: Rio Tinto
    • one is seen as a brick-and-mortar retailer: Walmart, currently $400 billion
    • note: BRK is not on the list

Tech

The most under-reported story this decade: the fourth industrial revolution

Biggest advancement in user interfaces: spatial computing (AAPL)

  • Apple owns it
  • META doesn't have it
  • GOOG: dropped
  • probably another decade before we see it in full bloom
  • alpha generation: will use it
  • beta generation: will grow up with it

EVs

the universal supercharger plug: Tesla NACS

  • Tesla owns it
  • all other supercharging networks will fold by 2025

transition: adoption of EVs will not unfold as expected

  • RIDE: darling of Wall Street declared bankruptcy
  • #1 global brand: 2Q23 deliveries to be announced shortly; will provide clearer picture
  • more and more, EVs seen for elites; very, very expensive
  • once one has an EV, one thinks about re-charging 24/7; the issue lives in one's mind rent-free
  • we should start seeing stories on repeat buyers; used EVs for sale: won't be a pretty picture
  • for 90% of Americans, switching to an EV is a bridge too far

Renewable Energy

Solar, wind: works, at least in sunny, windy states with lots of land; incredibly expensive

  • Texas: relentless 100+ heat streak in early summer, 2023; unprecedented; electricity demand hit all-time records;
    • ERCOT: grid held; at great expense; spot costs jumped from $5 / MW to $5,000 / MW
    • luck or good planning? wind and solar gods favored Texas in June
  • solar
    • Texas: 25° 50' N to 36° 30' N (36° north to 26° south)
    • California: northern border: 38.8375; San Diego, 32.7157 ((40° north to 33° south)
  • wind
    • Texas: consistent and perfect "speed"
      • from the Gulf of Mexico to the Plains, Texas is home to three of the windiest cities in the United States. These cities average winds ranging from 12 MPH to over 13 MPH throughout the year, with higher winds recorded during periodic thunderstorms, hurricanes, and other seasonal storms.
    • California: varies across the state; 
      • off-shore best opportunity; on-shore, will not exceed Iowa's production
  • most under-reported wind story: as blades become more efficient, failure rate increases

Geo-Politics

Ukraine: Wagner group a bigger story than most realize

  • yes, a flash in the pan, but
  • will have major effect on US intel (CIA) operations
  • US CIA failure --> increased support for Ukraine

China: won't invade Taiwan in 2023 (or 2024, or 2025, or 2026, or 2027)

US Supreme Court

Tectonic

Warren Court: 1953 - 1969 -- most liberal court in US history,

  • 15 years, 261 days
  • I was born: 1951; high school graduate, 1969 -- most fascinating overlap of dates for me personally

Roberts Court: 2005 - present

  • 18 years and counting; in good health and only 68 years old; appears much youngeer
  • President Biden: 80 years old; could die in office of natural causes; more likely cognitive decline ends career;
  • will be seen by historians as most conservative court in US history
  • only major misstep: Obamacare
  • will beecome most divisive court

COVID-19

autumn, 2023: will it re-surface as a news story?
seasonal flu: whatever happened to seasonal flu?

Global Economies

$25 trilion: it's lonely at the top. Spend some time at the link; many, many story lines (see below)
graphic: this chart is way out dated; the gaps have become even greater

  • Nigeria makes the graphic; Russia doesn't

Graphics:

Apple -- The Final Frontier -- June 28, 2023

Locator: 10002AAPL.

Occasional Updates

September 18, 2023: link here.

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The Blog

Links:

Spatial computing: for now, "spatial computing" will be tracked at "Vision Pro" above.

  • wiki;
  • it's an incredibly short entry, but a lot is packed into that

Spatial computing was defined in 2003 by Simon Greenwold,[1] as "human interaction with a machine in which the machine retains and manipulates referents to real objects and spaces".

With the advent of consumer virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, companies such as Microsoft  and Magic Leap use "spatial computing" in reference to the practice of using physical actions (head and body movements, gestures, speech) as inputs for interactive digital media systems, with perceived 3D physical space as the canvas for video, audio, and haptic outputs. It is also tied to the concept of 'digital twins'.

Apple announced a spatial computing platform with the Vision Pro on 5 June 2023. It features several features such as Spatial Audio, two micro-OLED displays, the Apple R1 chip and eye tracking. It is planned to be released in 2024 in the United States

Why the Apple Watch exists: March 13, 2015. Link here.

Fast forward: why does Vision Pro exist? Why did "we" go to the moon? Two facts:

  • Meta: the "metaverse"
  • Google: spatial computing.

Maybe that's all one needs to know.

From March 9, 2015


Now:

**********************
Spatial Computing

My hunch: there will be no less than four dozen companies -- some of which don't exist -- that will partner in some way with Apple's spatial computing division

  • there will be many iterations of the Vision Pro
  • short term it will be a drag on earning;
  • impossible to imagine when Vision Pro moves the needle in a $3-trillion compaany
  • the biggest problem: how does one value the spin-offs and the value of the brand?