Locator: 49688EVS.
Autos.
Who would have predicted this two years ago?
They will try to spin it the best they can, but the short answer is this: both Farley and Barra blew it when it came to EVs.
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Meanwhile, Rivian Fell Another 6% Today
Locator: 49687B.
A sign of boredom: I'm watching Jim Cramer interview a CEO really, really excited about his company -- a company that has a P/E of 51 and a five-year chart as seen below; compare with a P/E of 37 for AAPL which across the board, every CNBC analyst considers expensive (AAPL). This stock will drop to $16 if the P/E matches Apple's, all else being equal. It gets tedious.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $57.60.
Active rigs: 29.
Two new permits, #4253 - #42554:
Three permits canceled:
Locator: 49686AVGO.
Updates
Later, 4:30 p.m. CT: AVGO drops back about an hour after earnings reported. Dropped back to where it was at the close and maybe even dropped lower. Bizarre.
Original Post
Bottom line: results tell me --
Trading / closed at $406.37
At the close: down 1.6%; down $6.60 for the day.
Immediately after hours: up 0.2%; up 81 cents.
Earnings pending.
Earnings are out.
AVGO surges: up $14.14.
AVGO: numbers across the board are higher -- link here -- posted quickly; needs to be fact-checked --
It's all about GPUs, CPUs, and TPUs.
Related to : Google and TPUs.
ORCL: GPU, moving into XPU but not Google TPUs.
Upside in Google TPUs. All of those are Broadcom.
We've talked about this before. It was noted in print medium just before Cramer mentioned it a few days ago.
Broadcom: teased us with "three companies contributing to all revenue" last quarter, but now, a "fourth company" has been added. We do not know the fourth company but the company may be revealed today.
In June, Broadcom said it had three customers and four prospects for its custom AI chips.
Could it be OpenAI be the fourth? Might there be a fourth and a fifth?
From September 25, 2025, from the blog:
Ask AI: Broadcom puts its AI revenue opportunity at between $60 billion and $90 billion by 2027 just from three existing hyperscale customers. Who are the three customers?
Reply: not publicly disclosed. Rumors: Alphabet's Google, Meta Platforms, and ByteDance.
ByteDance is the Chinese internet technology company behind social media apps like TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin.
More recently, that four major customer might be Anthropic (Claude). So, the betting is on Anthropic or OpenAI.
Increased their dividend by 10%?
Intel, AMD, and all the rest --> Nvidia --> AVGO.
The pie keeps getting bigger but there are more and more slices being cut. More and more slices, but the individual slices may also be getting bigger.
Intel makes CPUs.
Seldom mentioned: high-bandwidth memory. After hours, MU is up after Broadcom's earnings report. MU = high-bandwidth memory.
Locator: 49685INVESTING.
What no one is talking about: the greatest generation -- growing much small by the day -- the baby boomers -- retiring in greater numbers every day -- are finally taking their RMDs for 2025. Many have waited until "the last minute" and now they must take their RMDs. A lot of folks are using their RMDs to re-balance their portfolios.
Autos.
Who would have predicted this two years ago?
They will try to spin it the best they can, but the short answer is this: both Farley and Barra blew it when it came to EVs.
Locator: 49683TOPWOMEN.
But first: the Dow hits an all-time high. Right now up 620 points. Wow, wow, wow. Josh Brown: this is a bull market. Even BRK-B is up. Tech is getting hit. By the way, close, close reading of Jay Powell's comments yesterday suggest that the job numbers could become a bigger factor in the Fed's future decisions than 3% inflation.
NASCAR: antitrust suit settled. Never bet against Michael Jordan? Link here.
Josh Brown: no one was talking about a "Dow 50,000" last year.
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Back To The Future
Forbes: I'm sure the links are everywhere.
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Focus On Dividends
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DFW
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Sophia Update
Locator: 49682DISNEY.
Locator: 49682OPENAI.
Locator: 49682SORA.
Locator: 49681B.
Disney - OpenAI licensing agreement: yes, AI is real. Money is flowing from Bob Iger to Sam Altman. Link here. Three year, exclusive deal, for now. Sam Altman: "a wonderful start." Long interview on CNBC -- joint interview, side-by-side -- Bob Iger and Sam Altman. Iger looked almost giddy; couldn't quit smiling. Altman, not particularly well known for having a public happy face. LOL. Altman's huge competitor is Google (Gemini). Quick, who owns YouTube? Who was the big loser? Again, did someone miss an opportunity?
Chart of the Day:
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $57.44.
New wells reporting:
RBN Energy: US E&Ps continue to maintain investor support despite commodity price plunge.
It hasn’t been easy, but the leading U.S. oil and gas producers have maintained investor support — even as crude prices dropped by 25% over the past three years. Much like the characters in “Wicked,” whose grip on the audience’s loyalty endures, magic or no magic, these companies have cast their own spell by throttling back capital spending, prioritizing shareholder returns and keeping new debt at bay. In today’s RBN blog, we analyze the cash-allocation strategies of U.S. E&Ps in Q3 2025.
It was no surprise that surging post-pandemic commodity prices drove a massive recovery in E&P share prices through the mid-2022 peak. Crude oil prices subsequently retreated, however, tumbling 25% from $84.26/bbl at the end of Q3 2022 to $63.96/bbl on September 30, the end of Q3 2025. What is remarkable is that the S&P E&P Index rose by 6% over the same period. The factors that have made oil and gas producer shares so “popular” include their decision a few years back to dramatically shift cash allocation from capital investment to dividends and share repurchases. As we explained in Mission: Impossible, the average E&P dividend yield of the 39 companies we monitor soared from 1% in 2019 to 3.28% in 2022, 3.98% in 2023 and 3.79% in 2024. Despite lower commodity realizations, the average yield remained elevated at 3.65% through the first nine months of 2025, more than three times the average 1.18% yield of the S&P 500 in September.
Sustaining dividends while revenues decline raises concerns that the industry might be tempted to use debt financing for shareholder returns. However, as we recently explained in Zero Sum Game, the average debt-to-capital ratio of the companies we cover dipped to a five-year low of 24.5% in Q2 2025, far below the nearly 40% peak during the pandemic. Our universe of E&Ps actually reduced net debt by $9 billion from Q2 2024 to Q2 2025, despite continued strong acquisition activity.
The major reason balance sheets have remained solid is that the acquisitions were largely equity-funded. As shown in Figure 1 below, the total shares outstanding for the companies we follow (combined blue and green bar segments and left axis) jumped from 8 billion in 2021 to more than 10 billion in 2024 through substantial equity issuances (green bar segments and left axis). Diluting shareholder equity by increasing the number of outstanding shares normally depresses stock prices, but E&Ps have been able to mitigate that trend by sustaining significant share-repurchase programs (purple line and right axis). ExxonMobil and Chevron, which have pursued the most aggressive buyback programs ($20 billion and $15 billion in 2024, respectively), have dramatically curtailed their programs in favor of dividends as commodity prices have declined. Because share issuances have slowed through the first three quarters of the year, the total shares outstanding for the 39 companies we follow have actually declined.
