Trump Accounts For Infants And Children -- July 21, 2025

Locator: 48796IRA.

This is what I wrote back in early July:

Trump Accounts For Infants And Children: The "$1,000 Trump Accounts" program proposed by President Donald Trump would be tax-deferred investment accounts for newborns, intended to give children a financial head start. 

In fact, these accounts are god-awful. Absolutely worthless. They are way too limited, too many strings attached, only allow eight years total investment (birth to age eight), and when tapped, taxed at regular income rates. "529s" are so much better. 

We may discuss this again later, once the bill passes, assuming it does (pass).

Now today, a complete flip-flop on my part: either I misread or the source provided me incorrect information or the bill completely changed since I first read about it. Now that the bill has passed, the "Trump accounts for infants and children" program is an incredibly good deal, and I'm thrilled that it exists.

Likely the most read story regarding these accounts is from The New York Times. It would be nice to get the data points without the comments, and then once the data points are provided, then all the pros and cons that they want. 

Anyone objecting to these accounts, now that I've seen the rules as written to this point, suggests to me that anyone not taking advantage of these plans is among the top 1% in this country and money means nothing to them. For everyone else, there's a place in one's portfolio for these accounts.

Again, this is a complete flip-flop from my earlier position. Either the rules changed for the better or I completely misread the original bill. However, the article did say the "Trump IRAs" did change as the program worked it was through Congress.

Most Important Data Point You May See All Day -- Monday, July 21, 2025

Locator: 48795TV.

Link here. 

Let this sink in.

I might talk about it later.

Enerplus With Six New Permits -- July 21, 2025

Locator: 48794B.

Stargate: oh, oh. Exclusive in The WSJ. I track Stargate here. Stargate struggling. This story may have legs, or it's simply one should expect in a $500-billion start-up with individuals at the top with strong personalities.

Investing: quick, name the four individuals/sources that have affected your portfolio -- good and bad -- the past three years. I'll come back to this. Two individuals were huge disappointments; one source was an incredibly good source; another individual was a great source, but I say that with a lot of reservation. I will talk about this later. 

Investing: is Devon about ready to reward investors?

That B-52 - Delta Airlines "incident" last Friday? Something tells me there's more to the story. I think I know what happened  but we'll the folks that are much smarter than I tell the story. That story will be told over the next few days or weeks, and maybe we'll hear something more. My hunch: this story has no legs.

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

WTI: $67.20.

Active rigs: 33.

Six new permits, #42143 - #42148, inclusive:

• Operator: Enerplus
• Field: South Fork (Dunn County)
• Comments:
• Enerplus has permits for six MHA wells -- Perch, Paddlefish, Rainbow, Stickleback, Cod, and Cacao, NWSW 14-148-93, 
• to be sited 1328 / 1637 FSL and 334  692 FWL.

Five permits renewed:

• CLR (2): beaver Lodge, Williams County;
• XTO (3): three Sakakawea Federal, Hofflund, McKenzie County;

One producing well (a DUC) reported as completed:

• 30294, 431, Hunt Oil Company, Palermo MCNIC 156-90-22-23H-2, Mountrail County;

Headlines -- July 21, 2025

Locator: 48793HEADLINES.

Clearing out the inbox. Links quickly with minimal comments. 

HES: up 7% today.

Index of leading indicators: absolutely Goldilocks down 0.3% vs down 0.2%.

Sam Altman: "they" better figure out how to have over 100 million GPUs. Link here. Bubble? Who are you gonna believe? Who are you gonna call?

• "they"? Nvidia
• if you don't understand Altman's comment, you aren't paying attention
• I thought I was paying attention, and I didn't understand the comment at first. LOL.
• the rest of that tweet from Sam Altman:
• "we will cross over one million GPUs brought online by the end of this year!
• very proud of the team but now they better get to work figuring out how to 100x that lol.

AAPL: Tom Lee. 

Magnets: Chinese rare-earth magnet exports surge

• US trade truce
• US manufacturers scramble to get these critical, necessary magnets
• all agree the scramble has results in a surge of 150%; some say, 660% (no typo);
• depends o when and what one is measuring
• the article is a must-read with regard to global magnets -- my takeaway -- the Chinese magnet story is a bit exaggerated.
• there may be a relative shortage regionally, and perhaps globally
• but the "maldistribution/logistics" story is a bigger story than any "shortage"
  

Stellantis: scraps hydrogen vehicle program. Wow. Trump has been president for six months. Link here.

Stellantis: warns that it will lose $2.7 billion after releasing preliminary estimates for the first six months of the year (2025); link here. 

Volvo: can't kill it's models fast enough. Volvo will effectively be another SUV-only brand in the US. Link here. Ford, too, is now mostly a truck, SUV, and crossover utility vehicle brand (fact-check with AI). Quora, for what it was worth, had a discussion centered on same issue. Link here.

Amazon margins: link here.

One doesn't hear this often: 

Chevron's acquisition of Hess is said to be by some a "once-in-several-lifetimes" asset for the oil giant. I don't know. But folks don't say that often. HES had a market cap value  of $46 billion at the close last Friday (or whenever the last trading day was). CVX bought it for $53 billion. 

CVX today has a market cap value of $260 billion. 

According to ChatGPT:

• As of July 11, 2023, Chevron’s market cap was approximately $270.7 billion the Hess deal was officially announced on October 23, 2023
• therefore, immediately prior to the announcement, Chevron’s market cap stood in the $260–$270 billion range.

So, what gives? 

Sarepta: I don't know how much I want to say about this, but there's a lot more to the Sarepta story than the headlines. This is a huge story. For some investors this could move the needle. This is not an investment site so I'm not going to say more. Thirty seconds of research may be all you need to make a decision. 

DFW-area airports: in addition to the McKinney reliever airport (ICAO: KTKI) highlighted below there are several additional reliever airports in the DFW area. One that particularly interests me is the Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport, previously known as, and often still referred to as simply the "Alliance Airport." The ICAO code for the Alliance Airport is KAFW.

Cleveland-Cliffs surges on earnings results. 

Very, very mixed results; mostly guidance, it appears driving investor interest. Suggests how excited investors are with regard to steel industry in the US. Analysts not so excited. Cleveland-Cliffs reported a loss of 50 cents/share, but that was less than expected. Ticker: down 30% over the full past year; 52-week high: $16; trading at $11 today. P/E: of course, N/A. The elephant in the room: Nippon-US Steel deal. The big question: what is driving the US steel market? ChatGPT: for me, the answer, was generally unhelpful. A lot of blah, blah, blah. There is not there there. There is no 30-second elevator speech. If forced: tariffs; industrial revolution; favorable business environment, consolidation in the industry.

NGL Takeaway Duel In The Bakken -- RBN Energy -- July 21, 2025

Locator: 48792B.

NASCAR: Denny Hamlin won in double over-time after a short rain delay. Link here.

Nosebleed levels? S&P 500, NASDAQ: in early trading both at record highs

MOJO, YOLO, FOMO: XYZ (Block Inc) -- up 7% at the open.

AAPL: opens up over 1%. Adds $2.18 to share price. BRK-B should follow. [Later: holy mackerel, AAPL now up over $3 / share.]

• if AAPL / BRK-B recover to their old highs, I will refer to them as the "Twin Towers."
• Spurs Tim Duncan and David Robinson
• recommend: AAPL on x -- link here.
• right now, at this moment, my x feed: first item -- Tom Lee on AAPL / Evan
  

Amazon Kuiper / SpaceX StarLink: explained here. Now I get it. Currently holds top blog position.

Hobgoblin of little minds. The phrase I've been looking for, for years. Thank you, Jim.

Jim Cramer: extolling the features of chatbots; when researching checks out all five chatbots; one he found unreliable; but changes rapidly. coming next: the meta-chatbot -- why not?

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

WTI: $67.01.

New wells:

• Tuesday, July 22, 2025: 31 for the month, 31 for the quarter, 461 for the year,
• 40862, conf, Grayson Mill, Martin 32-36 XS 1H,
• Monday, July 21, 2025: 30 for the month, 30 for the quarter, 460 for the year,
• None.
• Sunday, July 20, 2025: 30 for the month, 30 for the quarter, 460 for the year,
• None.
• Saturday, July 19, 2025: 30 for the month, 30 for the quarter, 460 for the year,
• 41042, conf, Oasis, Sedge 5202 24-17 3B,
• 40809, conf, Oasis, Wolfman 5602 43-15 3B,
• 40808, conf, Oasis, Wolfman 5602 43-15 2B,

RBN Energy: the duel over movig Bakken shale NGLs to downstream fractionators. Archived. 

Associated gas production in the Bakken Shale continues to increase and, with more NGL pipeline capacity coming online and a new option on the horizon, there’s a gunfight brewing between two of the U.S.’s largest midstreamers. At one end of a dusty Wild West street stands the sheriff in town, ONEOK, which recently completed an expansion of its Elk Creek NGL Pipeline. At the other is a renowned midstreamer from Texas, Kinder Morgan, which is staking a claim in the Rockies by converting its Double H crude oil pipeline to NGL service — renaming it Hiland Express when it does — and planning an NGL header pipeline. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, Kinder is the first to challenge ONEOK in this space. 

As in the Permian, drilling-and-completion activity in the Bakken is driven by crude oil. But also like its West Texas/Southeast New Mexico sibling, crude-focused wells in western North Dakota and the eastern edge of Montana generate massive volumes of associated gas that need to be processed (to separate natural gas from mixed NGLs) and then piped away. Last year, in Take It To The Limit, we explained that the gas-to-oil ratio (GOR) in the Bakken is now more than double what it was a decade ago. And the associated gas packs plenty of NGLs — varying widely by location but about 9 gallons per Mcf (GPM) on average. Altogether, the Bakken churns out more than 750 Mb/d of potential NGL production, about two-thirds of which is ultimately recovered, with the rest being ethane that is “rejected” into natural gas for its Btu value. (High levels of ethane rejection have raised concerns about high Btu levels in gas on Northern Border, the Bakken’s primary gas takeaway pipeline.)

There are five main ways to move NGLs out of the Bakken: (1) mixed NGLs piped south to Conway, KS, on ONEOK’s Elk Creek and Bakken NGL pipelines (medium-purple and dark-pink lines, respectively, in Figure 1 below); (2) ethane piped north to Canada on Pembina’s Vantage Pipeline (medium-green line); (3) so-called C3+ NGLs (propane, butanes and pentanes) either trucked or railed away — most ethane can’t be transported that way; (4) mixed NGLs entrained within “wet” gas on Pembina’s Alliance pipeline (light-pink line) to the Chicago area (where the NGLs are separated via fractionation); and (5) ethane rejected into gas on the Northern Border pipeline (dark-blue line).

Figure 1. Selected Pipelines Out of the Bakken. Source: RBN