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Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Absolutely Fascinating, This Market -- How Can One Not Be Excited? June 4, 2024

Locator: 48058INV.

It seems to be a trader's market but, wow, what great opportunities for investors, if one stays the course. 

Here we go, and this is just the beginning.

Iron Oil Prospects In The Parshall Oil Field, The Bakken -- June 4, 2024

Locator: 48057B.

Some big units, in. relatively unexplored area. It will be interesting how Iron Oil does with "new" technology and lessons learned in the Bakken, since 2000 / 2007.

From the June, 2024, hearing dockets:

Case 30989, Iron Oil, Parshall-Bakken, to establish six 1920-acre units, four horizontal wells in each unit (24 wells); establish three 1920-acre unit, four wells on each unit (12 wells); Mountrail County;

This is a case, not a permit.

The maps: three of the six 1920-acre units, in T154N R89W:

The wells and permits of interest:

  • 16840, 277, Proven Petroleum, Bergstrom Family trsut 26 1-H, Parshall, t1/08; cum 84K 4/24;
  • 19309, 100, Hunt, McAlmond 1-35-26H 1, Parshall, t1/11; cum 66K 4/24;
  • 39288, conf, Hunt, Oakland 154-89-18 SWD 1, Parshall,
  • 40033, conf, Hunt, Shell 153-89-5-8H 1, Parshall,
  • 40634, conf, Hunt, Oakland 154-89-30-19H-1, Parshall,

There's A Meme Out There That Daughter Wells Don't Produce As Well As Parent Wells In Shale Plays -- June 4, 2024

Locator: 48056B.

This is not necessarily the norm in the Bakken (well, actually it is) but it's easy to find examples.

See the parent well here.

This is one of the daughter wells drilled in 2021, just a couple of years ago.

  • 38046, loc/A, Slawson, Muskrat Federal 3-28-33H, Big Bend, t1/22; cum 324K 4/24;
PoolDateDaysBBLS OilRunsBBLS WaterMCF ProdMCF SoldVent/Flare
BAKKEN4-20243065996504482061035174779
BAKKEN3-202430857589005447734854631737
BAKKEN2-20242910370100606441882261922485
BAKKEN1-202422834690234881703957921139
BAKKEN12-20232510632100656317885459592768
BAKKEN11-202321840384064293704542642675
BAKKEN10-20232130863730443726381978556
BAKKEN9-20232711214103277664945462403079
BAKKEN8-20230000000
BAKKEN7-20230000000
BAKKEN6-2023003180000
BAKKEN5-202317843289396966680031313583
BAKKEN4-2023521441390202117054651215
BAKKEN3-20230000000
BAKKEN2-20230000000
BAKKEN1-20232112219096138770865
BAKKEN12-202219751670904189592414364392
BAKKEN11-202213557853576008447123032105
BAKKEN10-2022291780917836128111441663617911
BAKKEN9-2022282234822908866318186599612052
BAKKEN8-20222624321239141053019828353916159
BAKKEN7-20223129717296841378324290263321502
BAKKEN6-20222929165296051723023797220021451
BAKKEN5-20223030474300271841924705364120912
BAKKEN4-20221920288203221622316355328812972
BAKKEN3-20223040228403354168232461477027543
BAKKEN2-20221217285170831922713878013817
BAKKEN1-20221715005750570
BAKKEN12-20211330016011

Updating An Incredible Slawson Well Drilled Back In 2011 -- Still A Big Producer -- June 4, 2024

Locator: 48055B.

NDIC still shows this well as "F" without a pump.

The well:

  • 19255, 718, Slawson, Muskrat Federal 1-28-33H, Van Hook, Bakken, t1/11; cum 491K 4/18; off line while other Muskrat Federal wells being fracked; cum 614K 4/21; cum 710K 4/24; recent production:
PoolDateDaysBBLS OilRunsBBLS WaterMCF ProdMCF SoldVent/Flare
BAKKEN4-2024301969190212152448227325
BAKKEN3-2024312004209713512575234674
BAKKEN2-202422148813639381368116494
BAKKEN1-20243121432687158116271202270
BAKKEN12-2023302502215718422210197683
BAKKEN11-2023302465252022932639247613
BAKKEN10-20233126012941170929662628183
BAKKEN9-202330252824781895280326540
BAKKEN8-202331264925492117300728520
BAKKEN7-202330261424692139319430420
BAKKEN6-202330254325183301301528650
BAKKEN5-2023231992182734501506132467
BAKKEN4-20232728043192277226632412116

 Back in 2014:

BAKKEN12-20143142594233132629312635141
BAKKEN11-201430512449761586295728070
BAKKEN10-20143153675412164636642679830
BAKKEN9-20143055805808183338023477175
BAKKEN8-201425353040531347233022050
BAKKEN7-20141626522065936168916090
BAKKEN6-201429487350331481370235570
BAKKEN5-201431570056721772425641010
BAKKEN4-201430566956741698347333230
BAKKEN3-201431641866601895421540600
BAKKEN2-201428641061551855421240720
BAKKEN1-201431764780732332521150560

Back in 2012:

BAKKEN12-2012314378390312016663560
BAKKEN11-201223464245141287184716170
BAKKEN10-201226681869291938236521050
BAKKEN9-2012309996102442673689465940
BAKKEN8-20123110413113212957624059300
BAKKEN7-20123111069106962901760572950
BAKKEN6-2012301052499842940741471140
BAKKEN5-20123113563135453667960392930
BAKKEN4-20122812549120484508704067600
BAKKEN3-201226189924014084612010
BAKKEN2-201226444450431480259623360
BAKKEN1-201231966996532608622459140

First four months of production:

BAKKEN5-20112914913147973741961793270
BAKKEN4-2011271013995272024640554031002
BAKKEN3-2011291544115836429698431979646
BAKKEN2-20112827410254291015312223012223
BAKKEN1-2011221338712840769422000

Elon Musk, xAI, Tesla And Nvidia -- June 4. 2024

Locator: 48053EVS.

This is probably more serious than I'm making it out to be, but for me this is simply airing dirty laundry and / or family squabbling. By the way, is it possible this connects the new "X" policy "dot"? Fascinating.

On the other hand, it helps me keep up with the AI jargon ... and also helps me to keep up with the AI revolution.

Link here

Headline:

I think the third "bullet" is conjecture, and not "measurable."

From the linked article:

Elon Musk says he can grow Tesla into “a leader in AI & robotics,” an ambition that he’s said will require a lot of pricey processors from Nvidia to build up its infrastructure.

On Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call in April, Musk said the electric vehicle company will increase the number of active H100s — Nvidia’s flagship artificial intelligence chip — from 35,000 to 85,000 by the end of this year. He also wrote in a post on X a few days later that Tesla would spend $10 billion this year “in combined training and inference AI.”

But emails written by Nvidia senior staff and widely shared inside the company suggest that Musk presented an exaggerated picture of Tesla’s procurement to shareholders. Correspondence from Nvidia staffers also indicates that Musk diverted a sizable shipment of AI processors that had been reserved for Tesla to his social media company X, formerly known as Twitter.

Tesla shares slipped as much as 1% on the news Tuesday morning.

By ordering Nvidia to let privately held X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk pushed back the automaker’s receipt of more than $500 million in graphics processing units, or GPUs, by months, likely adding to delays in setting up the supercomputers Tesla says it needs to develop autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

“Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead,” an Nvidia memo from December said. “In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.”

A more recent Nvidia email, from late April, said Musk’s comment on the first-quarter Tesla call “conflicts with bookings” and that his April post on X about $10 billion in AI spending also “conflicts with bookings and FY 2025 forecasts.” The email referenced news about Tesla’s ongoing, drastic layoffs and warned that head-count reductions could cause further delays with an “H100 project” at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory.

The new information from the emails, read by CNBC, highlights an escalating conflict between Musk and some agitated Tesla shareholders who question whether the billionaire CEO is fulfilling his obligations to Tesla while also running a collection of other companies that require his attention, resources and hefty amounts of capital.

 It doesn't take a rocket scientist to extrapolate what's going on in the AI world.

My Favortie Subscription: The Atlantic -- 80 Years Ago -- June 4, 2024

Locator: 48052BOOKS.

The Atlantic

Another article on WWII.

It begins:

For most Americans, D-Day remains the most famous battle of World War II. It was not the end of the war against Nazism. At most, it was the beginning of the end. Yet it continues to resonate 80 years later, and not just because it led to Hitler’s defeat. It also signaled the collapse of the European empires and the birth of an American superpower that promised to dedicate its foreign policy to decolonization, democracy, and human rights, rather than its own imperial prestige.

It is easy to forget what a radical break this was. The term superpower was coined in 1944 to describe the anticipated world order that would emerge after the war. Only the British empire was expected to survive as the standard-bearer of imperialism, alongside two very different superpower peers: the Soviet Union and the United States. Within weeks of D-Day, however, the British found themselves suddenly and irrevocably overruled by their former colony.

That result was hardly inevitable. When the British and the Americans formally allied in December 1941, the British empire was unquestionably the senior partner in the relationship. It covered a fifth of the world’s landmass and claimed a quarter of its people. It dominated the air, sea, and financial channels on which most global commerce depended. And the Royal Navy maintained its preeminence, with ports of call on every continent, including Antarctica.

The United States, by contrast, was more of a common market than a nation-state. Its tendency toward isolationism has always been overstated. But its major foreign-policy initiatives had been largely confined to the Western Hemisphere and an almost random collection of colonies (carefully called “territories”), whose strategic significance was—at best—a point of national ambivalence.

In the two years after Pearl Harbor, the British largely dictated the alliance’s strategic direction. In Europe, American proposals to take the fight directly to Germany by invading France were tabled in favor of British initiatives, which had the not-incidental benefit of expanding Britain’s imperial reach across the Mediterranean and containing the Soviet Union (while always ensuring that the Russians had enough support to keep three-quarters of Germany’s army engaged on the Eastern Front).

Things changed, however, in November 1943, when Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt held a summit in Cairo. The British again sought to postpone the invasion of France in favor of further operations in the Mediterranean. The debate quickly grew acrimonious. At one point, Churchill refused to concede on his empire’s desire to capture the Italian island of Rhodes. George Marshall, the usually stoic U.S. Army chief of staff, shouted at the prime minister, “Not one American is going to die on that goddamned beach!” Another session was forced to end abruptly after Marshall and his British counterpart, Sir Alan Brooke, nearly came to blows.

With the fate of the free world hanging in the balance, a roomful of 60-year-old men nearly broke out into a brawl because by November 1943, America had changed. It was producing more than twice as many planes and seven times as many ships as the whole British empire. British debt, meanwhile, had ballooned to nearly twice the size of its economy. Most of that debt was owed to the United States, which leveraged its position as Britain’s largest creditor to gain access to outposts across the British empire, from which it built an extraordinary global logistics network of its own.

My hunch: Marjorie Taylor Greene and 46 of her GOP supporters would not have supported FDR had they been around then. They would have supported US Army chief of staff George Marshall.

Just my opinion.

Author of the article:

Michel Paradis is a law professor at Columbia Law School and the author of The Light of Battle: Eisenhower, D-Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower. Available as of today, June 4, 2024:

Why is the publication date of this book June 4th and not June 6th?


I haven't read / bought a book on US military history in "ages"; maybe it's time.

My Favorite Chart -- It's Getting Interesting -- Four New Permits -- June 4, 2024

Locator: 48051B.

My favorite chart, link here:





Might we see a reversal in "my favorite chart" sometime this summer? It peaked a couple of months ago and started reversing. Might it reverse again?

Market today: eked out "green" in three major indices.

Next big thing: what I would like to see -- a "crowd-source" app tracking new car sales and what folks actually paid, in real time.

*********************************
Back to the Bakken

WTI: $73.25.

Active rigs: 38.

Four new permits, #40807 - #30810:
  • Operators: Hess (2), Oasis (2):
  • Fields: Ellsworth (McKenzie); Bonetrail (Williams)
  • Comments:
    • Hess has permits for two wells, a BW-Hagen well, NWNE 15-149-100; and an EN-Uran A well, SWSW 10-154-93, 
      • the first to be sited 753 FNL and 2171 FEL, and the second to be sited 391 FSL and 497 FWL;
    • Oasis has permits for two Wolfman wells, SWSE 15-156-102, 
      • both to be sited 2575/574 FEL with one at 388 FSL and one at 355 FSL
Two producing wells (DUCs) reported as completed:
  • 35216, 3,175, XTO, Teddy Federal 12X-5A, North Fork, minimal production reported;
  • 40192, 813, Whiting, Tri D Ranch 5696 13-18 6BX, Dollar Joe, nopd

Crowdstrike Volatile After Hours -- Finally Surges — Earnings Results — June 4, 2024

Locator: 48050TECH.

Crowdstrike beats. Price recovers after hours; then surges. CNBC was smart to delay comments for a few minutes before reporting.

HPE up almost 10 percent after earnings reported.

INTC near 12-month low. Has a lot riding on foundry business. Apollo takes 49% stake in Intel Ireland foundry. Interesting.

10-year Treasury breaks below 4.35% again.

$3-Trillion Watch -- Update -- June 4, 2024

Locator: 48049AAPL.

Apple is playing the "long game." I'm thinking about the news that came out of Spotify today. Raising its prices again, twice in one year. Apple is now significantly less expensive than Spotify.

***************************
For The Archives
 
Apple Books: link here.

 
*******************
$3-Trillion Watch
 
June 4, 2024:


***********************
Original Post

We talked about this (the following) over the weekend. 

Posting it for the archives, leading up to WWDC next week.


AAPL needs to hit $195.33 to hit $3-trillion market cap again.

  • (195.33-194.08) / 194.08 = 0.00644 = 0.644% to get to $3-trillion market cap.
  • (200 - 194.08) / 194.08 = 0.0305 = 3.05% to get to $200 / share.

Grapevine Lake Water Level Now Exceeds The 100-Year Flood Recorded In 2019 -- June 4, 2024

Locator: 48048TEXAS.

Observation: this is what amazes me. It's not that the earth has water -- absolutely critical for life -- but that life has so much water. Earth is not a rocky planet, it's a water planet. It's a blue marble.  

Two 100-year floods in five years? Whatever happened to all drought predicted by "global warming / climate change" models? 

They must have learned / responded after 2019; this year, despite record levels, nothing serious for the city of Grapevine (yet).

In the graphic below, the only significant difference I see between 2019 and 2024, is that in 2019, the rate of increase in the water level was faster -- perhaps that's the difference.

Link here.

Gen Z: The Taylor Swift Generation. Is Gen A About To Become The Taylor Swift Eras Tour Generation? June 4, 2024

Locator: 48047DIVAS.

This all started with this post.

Now, today, the update: "She dominates our age!" How Taylor Swift became the greatest show on earth. Link to The [London] Guardian

Someday I may have to subscribe to The [London] Guardian

Having said all that, Taylor Swift is not yet in Cher's universe. IYKYK. Taylor Swift is 34 years old. Cher was packing them in when she was 56 years old. 

And Cher is not going quietly into the night.

Beautiful, Beautiful Morning In Downtown Southlake, TX -- June 4. 2024

Locator: 48046AAPL.

Four big stories today:

  • Microsoft: laying off folks; quietly ghosting HoloLens? Link here.
  • despite volatile market, AAPL stayed in the green overnight
  • WTI: broke below $73, but has since recovered. Slightly.
  • economy: 2Q24 GDP estimate dropping like a rock -- GDPNow down to 1.8 vs 2.7. 
    • we now have enough data  (IYKYK)
    • to sell ads, CNBC will hype the May, 2024, jobs report, knowing that "jobs" is a lagging indicator
Blogging: because of family commitments, blogging will be minimized, delayed.

Southlake, TX: I had some errands to run after dropping Sophia off for her sailing lessons on Grapevine Lake. Wow, what a beautiful day. Reminds me of the "better" days in New England: somewhat cool, slightly breezy, not particularly humid, but a bit of drizzle and overcast. It's hard to believe that a planet like this exists in the known universe. The only one. And we happen to be here at this point in time. Although I would have preferred to be this age in the 1960s?

Grapevine Lake Water Level: link here.

Commentary: probably not until later today. I have an appointment in twenty minutes and am enjoying coffee and a croissant. Very expensive coffee and croissant but I don't get into downtown Southlake much any more and I'll consider this part of my vacation this year. LOL.

Personal investing: I haven't decided yet, but most likely I will add to my ING and CRH positions again later today. I think I did the same thing yesterday. By rule. No recommendation. See disclaimer. On this dip I would love to buy more energy, but rules won't allow it. Just out of curiosity, what's NVDA doing today, early morning trading? Down 0.3%; down $3. AAPL? Flat. 

Yesterday, I spoke with a cybersecurity expert, who I'll refer to as Expert A in this short commentary: his views on "Nvidia" and my views are pretty much identical. I would love to know what flashes across his mind when I start mentioning CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs on the same chip.  I mentioned the M4. He said: SOC. I'm so used to that "acronym" I failed to mention it. 

Just for the fun of it, google SOC chips. What's the first hit, and what's the first image? This:

"Expert A" suggested this is what differentiates Apple hardware from Dell's hardware. Dell needs to buy CPUs and GPUs separately and then "wire" them together in their laptops. That's so yesterday. But Dell is the current "darling" on Wall Street" which speaks volumes. I assume Dell uses NPUs but not necessarily. Not many folks understand why M4s are so amazing.

Nvidia: Blackwell "flying" off the shelves. Rubin up next.

AMD: Ryzen.

Is Dell simply an assembler?  Link here. This is so yesterday. This is like paying your college roommate to build you your own computer. 

Are you kidding me?  

Apple, Tower or Rack:
Apple laptop

Reminder: 

**************************
Back to the Bakken

WTI
: $72.81. 

Wednesday, June 5, 2024: 54 for the month; 118 for the quarter, 317 for the year
40278, conf, CLR, Cuskelly 5-7H,
40245, conf, Empire North Dakota, Walleye 32-8 1H,
39387, conf, BR, Watchman Peak 2-8-11TFH,
38057, conf, Oasis, Wood 5498 12-25 4B,

Tuesday, June 4, 2024: 50 for the month; 114 for the quarter, 313 for the year
39386, conf, BR, Watchman Peak 3-8-11MBH,

RBN Energy: extensive connectivity supports Wink's emergence as a major Permian crude hub. Archived.

Situated in West Texas’s Winkler County, the tiny city of Wink (population just under 1,000) might seem easy to overlook but it holds a special place in music history as the childhood home of Roy Orbison — he formed his first band, the Wink Westerners, there in 1949. But beyond its rich musical legacy, Wink in recent years has emerged as a key hub for crude oil connectivity in the prolific Permian Basin. Don’t blink or you might miss out on what’s happening in this dynamic locale, the subject of today’s RBN blog.