Monday, August 12, 2024

Biden, BP, And The High-Stakes Sequel To Deepwater Horizon -- Javier Blas -- Bloomberg Opinion -- August 12, 2024

Locator: 48390GULF.

Tag: BP Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon

Link here.

The Book Page: From One Cell, Ben Stanger -- August 12, 2024

Locator: 48389B.

Tag: forecast global consumption.

Global oil demand, link here.


Forecast:

  • 2024: global consumption of liquid fuels will rise by 1.1 million bop;
  • 2025: will then rise another 1.6 million bopd (0.5/1.1 = 45% increase in growth y/y)

So, what was the forecast in 2020, in the midst of a global Covid pandemic? Link here.

**************************
The Book Page

From One Cell: A Journey Into Life's Origins And The Future Of Medicine, Ben Stanger, 2023.

Audience: should be summer reading for high school students -- juniors / seniors -- with plans to attend college to major in the life sciences.  

I'll be doing at least two posts on this book, maybe more. 

Right now, I'm reading the section in the book on "knockout mice."

 One can get caught up on "knockout mice" by starting with three links.

From the book:

In 1990, an Italian-born developmental biologist named Mario Capecchi made history by creating the world's first, "knockout mice."

The term may evoke images of rodents with prodigious boxing skills, but the recipient of the decisive blow in a knockout mouse is not an opposing mouse, it is a gene. Through a painstaking process of cellular engineering, Capecchi had worked out the conditions to alter the mammalian genome, and now he was telling the world how he had done it.

Capecchi had an unimaginably difficult childhood. Born in Italy to a single mother just before World War II, he became homeless at the age of four when the Nazis arrested his mother for anti-Fascist activities. The toddler was shuttled from one living situation to another, first to a farm, then an orphanage, and finally into the care of his estranged and abusive father.

After the war, Capecchi's mother found him in a Reggio Emilia hospital, close to death from typhoid and malnutrition.

From there, mother and son moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where his uncle a physicist and Quaker, took them in. The traumas of wartime dissipated slowly, as Capecchi immersed himself in sports and schoolwork.

He attended Antioch College, a small liberal arts school in Ohio, spending summers in MIT biology labs through the college's work-study program. From there, he attended graduate school at Harvard (under Jim Watson, of double-helix fame), and ultimately landed a job at the University of Utah.

Capecchi was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knockout mice.

Three New Permits Including A Wildcat; Three DUCs Reported As Completed -- August 12, 2024

Locator: 48388B.

WTI: $79.64.

Active rigs: 39.

Three new permits, #41015 - #41-17, inclusive:

  • Operators: Stephens Williston, Zavanna, WGO Resources;
  • Fields: Stanley (Mountrail); Epping (Williams); and, a wildcat in Golden Valley
  • Comments:
    • Stephens Williston has a permit for a Prattsville Federal well, SESW 7-155-90, 
      • to be sited 450 FSL and 1929 FWL;
    • Zavanna has a permit for a Midas well, SESE 36-155-99, 
      • to be sited 410 FSL and 1005 FEL;
    • WGO Resources has a permit for Koon Harkins well, SESW 35-140-104, 
      • to be sited 253 FSL and 1947 FWL, a wildcat;

Three producing wells (DUCs) reported to be completed:

  • 40171, 233, Morgan, Obrigewitch 1-33H,
  • 40172, 269, Morgan, Baranko 1-28H,
  • 40313, 83, Empire North Dakota, Woodpecker 29-11 1H,

CNBC -- Cramer's First Hour -- Clearing Out The In-Box -- August 12, 2024

Locator: 48387INV.

Recession! What recession? Come on .... Brian Sozzi, Executive Editor, Yahoo!Finance. Link here

All this recession talk feels like BS to me, an excuse to shake out the average investor so institutional players could get back into high-flying names at cheaper prices. Everyone does know that a recession often means negative economic growth, right? Or a significant slowdown in the economy that lasts quarters or even years?
So the US economy is going to go from 2.8% second quarter GDP growth and a long period of steady expansion to slightly negative growth or worse sometime within the next six months? An economy still creating a good clip of jobs each month is going to begin producing job losses in the near future?
Where is the evidence to support this? What's the trigger for it? Don't hit me up on X, formerly Twitter, and say it's interest rates because the economy has been doing just fine during this high rate period.
Lost in recession BS this week was an ISM services report, which includes data on business activity, new orders, employment, and supplier deliveries. The index clocked in at 51.4%, up from 48.8% in June.
Numbers over 50% are seen as positive for the economy. Most companies in the report said business was either flat or expanding gradually.
Then, initial jobless claims totaled a seasonally adjusted 233,000 for the week — a drop of 17,000. The Street was looking for a print of around 240,000.

EPD: three momentum stocks

Nvidia: the AI chip delay isn't worrying Wall Street. Earnings to be reported August 28, 2024. 

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge: beauty before brawn. The Verge. 

Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chips have quickly turned Windows on Arm into a viable platform. We’ve tested over half a dozen laptops with the new processors, and even the least powerful chip matches Intel and last-gen AMD on CPU performance and beats them on battery life. But I’ve been eager to get my hands on a laptop with Qualcomm’s fastest Snapdragon processor to see if it can do even more. I got to see the high-end model in action back in April on a demo machine, and it seemed like it would be the chip to help usher in a new era of faster, more power-efficient Windows PCs and take on Apple’s MacBook Air M3 in a way that Intel or AMD hadn’t been able to accomplish.
 
That chip — the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100 — is only available in one Copilot Plus PC: Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 Edge. It’s Samsung’s thinnest and lightest 16-inch laptop, designed for everyday web browsing, a mix of business- and creative-focused work, and running Windows Copilot Plus AI apps like Live Captions and Cocreator. The Edge has similar features to the Intel-based Galaxy Book4 Ultra, like an AMOLED display and a fingerprint reader, but it also offers faster ports and faster Wi-Fi.

The X1E-84-100 chip is supposed to be up to 20 percent faster than the next model down. Samsung had a chance to make the laptop that could show the platform’s full potential. Instead, it underpowered the hell out of that chip to have the thinnest chassis possible. There’s still a good laptop in the Book4, but you don’t need to buy the best chip to get it — and you’d actually be better off saving the cash.

Apple Maps on web now supports Firefox browser. Link here.

Intel: bringing GPUs to cars. Link here.

Theme for the day: there are two things you can't fight -- a) the Fed; and, b) natural gas. Can we add a third? Nividia, link here. NVID up over 2% today.

***********************
Cramer: Monday -- First Hour

Pre-market: all major indices green, but not by much; muted Monday.

Hyperscalers: Cramer wants to eliminate this term. David Faber suggests "planet eaters."

Personal investing: Sophia is looking at any of the seven mag-7 companies, CHRD, or NOG; AMZN or WMT.

***********************************
Disclaimer Briefly 
Reminder
  • I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market, 
  • I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. 
  • See disclaimer. This is not an investment site. 
  • 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.
  • Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market, 
  • I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple.

Monday Morning -- August 12, 2024

Locator: 48386B.

Theme for the day: there are two things you can't fight -- a) the Fed; and, b) natural gas.

Monday morning: Sunday night looked ominous. Monday morning, sun is coming up in the east.

Stellar coverage: Peacock and Mike Tirico. 

To do this in real-time, on the fly, speaks volumes about the talent behing and in front of the camera. I found the streaming absolutely incredibly. When I turned on Hulu (every day) there were, it seemed, no less than 24-options on which to click -- and with all those options, no problem finding what one wanted to see. Nice adjunct: YouTube.

It's interesting. Paris will have had a much better "view" for couch potatoes than Los Angeles will have in 2028, but Los Angeles is going to be so much more fun for athletes and those in the stands. The weather, the beaches, the bars.

Follow the money: how much in bonuses national committees paid their medalists, country, amount paid, number of country medals awarded (for the 2024 Paris Olympics)

  • by country:
    • France: $11 million, 64 team total (16-gold),
    • Italy: $10 million, 40 team total (12-gold),
    • US: $8 million, 126 team total (40-gold), 78 individual bronze, 72 individual silver, 69 individual gold; Stanford - 22; Harvard - 6; Southern Cal - 6 
  • assuming gold = x, silver = 1/2 x, bronze = 1/4x, each gold medal for a US athlete was worth about $60,000

Later, August 13, 2024: the medals note above was posted August 13, 2024. Today, August 13, 2024, "Which College Won the Olympics?" -- WSJ link here.

Stanford took home 39 medals, more than double the number of any other U.S. school—and more than the Netherlands, South Korea, Germany and Canada. 

The delegation from Palo Alto would have been 11th on the medal table in Tokyo and 10th in Rio. But in Paris, they managed to overachieve and finished 8th in the overall medal standings.

Nice interview over at Barron's: Jeremy Siegel.

Nice op-ed over at The NYT: presidential politics.  Agree completely. 

Nice graphic on hyperscalers: global data centers. Liz Ann Sonders.

Nice analysis by Peggy Noonan: Harris bets on the future being left-wing. Exhibit A: Walz.

US oil: doing more with less. That's been a constant theme on the blog for years. Exhibit A: rig count. 

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

WTI: $77.74. Whoo-hoo!

Tuesday, August 13, 2024: 27 for the month; 83 for the quarter, 409 for the year
40468
, conf, Kraken Operating, Milloy LE 10-3-34 11H,
39799, conf, Enerplus, Diamond 148-95-03A-10H,
39796, conf, Enerplus, Ruby 148-95-03B-10H,
24361
, conf, Grayson Mill, Knight 35-26 3TFH,

Monday, August 12, 2024: 23 for the month; 79 for the quarter, 405 for the year
39530, conf, Petro-Hunt, Burian 144-98-15B-22-1H,

Sunday, August 11, 2024: 22 for the month; 78 for the quarter, 404 for the year
None.

Saturday, August 10, 2024: 22 for the month; 78 for the quarter, 404 for the year
None.

RBN Energy: "certified" natural gas with lower methane intensity takes center stage.

Even as many countries and companies around the world continue to ramp up their use of wind and solar power and explore the potential for a variety of renewable, low-carbon and no-carbon fuels, there’s a growing acknowledgment that natural gas — imperfect as it may be from a climate perspective — will remain a significant part of the global energy mix for decades to come. So why not make natural gas as clean as it can be by reducing emissions of methane — gas’s primary component and a particularly potent greenhouse gas? E

First, a definition: Certified natural gas is gas that an independent third party has verified as being produced, gathered, processed, transported and/or distributed in a way that meets higher environmental standards or, more specifically, has a demonstrably lower methane intensity, or MI. For the most part, the certified gas movement has focused on the upstream end, namely where gas is produced, either in gas-focused plays like the Marcellus/Utica and the Haynesville or crude-oil-focused plays like the Permian and the Bakken, where large volumes of associated gas (a mix of methane, NGLs and various impurities) emerge from wells with crude oil.

Mideast — Looks Ominous — August 12, 2024

Locator: 48385MIDEAST.

Mideast looks ominous.

Link here.

Link here.

Reports that the Iron Dome has failed.