Apple Making A Fortune On AI -- March 20, 2026

Locator: 50269AAPL.

Tag: Apple AI 

Link here. 

 

Tech -- The Book Page -- March 20, 2026

Locator: 50268TECH.

Nvidia / Amazon: Nvidia confirmed that it will supply AWS with one million GPUs through 2027. Link here. 

Dell: one of Dell's biggest competitors, SMCI, may have just handed Dell billions of dollars after SMIC gets caught with fraud. Link here. 

SMCI is down almost 30% after prosecutors charged co-founder in alleged scheme to smuggle $2.5 billion of Nvidia servers to China. Something to do with swapping serial labels with hair dryers.

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The Book Page

Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire by Eckart Frahm, c. 2023, purchased April 6, 2025.

Eve:How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evoluton, Cat Bohanon, c. February 25, 2025.

Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, Anil Ananthaswamy, c. July 16, 2024, purchased March 18, 2026.

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, Patrick McGee, May 13, 2025. Have not purchased nor read.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell, April 7, 2015. Have not purchased nor read.

My Favorite Chart -- MMFs -- Another Record -- March 20, 2026

Locator: 50267MMFS.

Tag: MMF MMFs 

Link here. 

The change each week is in the billions. Last week it was amazing; something I had not seen before -- the change was less than one billion dollars. The change was an increase of 774 million over the previous week, if I recall correctly.

This week? Back in the billions. Specifically, an increase of 38.68 billion week over week.

 This was from last week:

It was a record last week, so I assume it's another record this week: $7.85668 trillion -- but I often make simple arithmetic errors.

TGIF -- March 20, 2026

Locator: 50266B.

EPIC FURY: Israel kills more high-ranking IRGC leaders. 

Chuck Norris, 86: link here. 

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Back to the Bakken 

WTI: $95.54.

New wells reporting:

• Sunday, March 22, 2026: 28 for the month, 132 for the quarter, 132 for the year,  
• None.
• Saturday, March 21, 2026: 28 for the month, 132 for the quarter, 132 for the year,  
• 42248, conf, CLR, Olympia 6-27HSL, Brooklyn, 
• 42097, conf, BR, RollaKellog 61-ULW,
• Friday, March 20, 2026: 26 for the month, 132 for the quarter, 132 for the year,
• None. 

RBN Energy: Iran war traps propane and refined products in Persian Gulf. Link here. Archived. 

A lot of attention has been paid to the massive volumes of crude oil and LNG currently trapped in the Persian Gulf, and for good reason — the region is a critically important global supplier. What’s sometimes overlooked by the media, however, is that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are also major exporters of refined products, and that they and Qatar also send out copious amounts of LPG. In today’s RBN blog, we consider the impact of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz on LPG and refined product exports from the Persian Gulf’s key producers.

The U.S. clearly has the upper hand over Iran from a military power perspective, but — so far, at least — Iran has countered that by severely limiting safe passage for crude oil supertankers, LNG carriers, and refined products and LPG vessels through the #1 maritime energy chokepoint in the world: the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman. Since the U.S. and Israel made their initial strikes on Iran on February 28, only a few dozen commercial vessels have safely traversed the narrow waterway, compared to a prewar pace of more than 100 per day. Most recently, as part of an effort to keep global energy prices from soaring to new heights, the U.S. has been allowing ships carrying Iranian crude oil and LPG to pass through, but Iran has maintained its hard line against transits by ships out of neighboring countries.

Understandably, markets and the media have focused primarily on the impact on crude oil and LNG. After all, the Persian Gulf countries (including Iran and Iraq) account for about one-sixth of global oil production and 20% of seaborne oil trade, and Qatar is the world’s second-largest exporter of LNG, behind only the U.S. It is important to remember, though, that the region also is home to several major refineries and NGL fractionation centers, and that Persian Gulf countries export large volumes of LPG and refined products like gasoline, diesel and naphtha.

We will start with NGLs. We should note up front that virtually all the ethane that emerges from wells in the Persian Gulf region is either rejected into natural gas and sold for its Btu value or separated at fractionators and consumed domestically at petrochemical plants. In contrast, much of the LPG (propane and butanes) and natural gasoline/pentanes-plus that is separated at fractionators is exported. Before the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz (orange circle in Figure 1 below), Persian Gulf countries had been sending out about 1.7 MMb/d of NGL purity products, including about 1.5 MMb/d of LPG and ~200 Mb/d of isobutane, natural gasoline and pentanes-plus. (More on export volumes and their destinations later.)