Cramer's First Hour -- 13 May 2026

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WTI: $102.20. 

Futures: future suggest "all" the tech losses from yesterday will be erased today. The Dow is down 130 points pre-market but how it affects an individual is greatly dependent on one's holdings. For example, Dow's CAT is up $2.86.  

Mortgage rates: move to highest level in five weeks, but homebuyers "shrug it off." We've had this discussion before. Within a range, mortgage rates have little effect on decision to buy or not buy. 

Semiconductors: PHXL. Top 30 components. Ticker SOX. 

 

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Destinations
Pottery Manufacturing In North Carolina

This is so incredibly cool!

AI prompt: pottery manufacturing development near Spruce Spine, North Carolina. 

AI reply: while Spruce Pine, NC, is a major center for quartz mining and semiconductor-related industries, it is not a hub for traditional pottery manufacturing; that distinction belongs to Seagrove, NC, which is centuries old and known as the "Handmade Pottery Capital of the United States." 

Spruce Pine's industrial development focuses on high-purity minerals rather than clay-based arts and crafts.

Spruce Pine's Industrial Focus:

• Mining: Spruce Pine is at the heart of a significant mining district that supplies high-purity quartz used in manufacturing integrated circuits.
• Companies: The mines are primarily owned by global material solutions companies like Sibelco and The Quartz Corp.

North Carolina's Pottery Hub:

• Seagrove: The region historically known for pottery manufacturing is Seagrove, located in central North Carolina, which has a tradition dating back to the 18th century and is considered the "Handmade Pottery Capital of the United States."

Geography:

• Spruce Pine is three hours, almost directly, west of Seagrove, North Carolina
• Spruce Pine is more inland, northwest side of Charlotte, NC
• Seagrove is nearer the cost, on the northeast side of Charlotte, NC

For more: see this on the blog. 

 

 

Five Oilfield Services Stocks For A Post-Hormuz World -- May 13, 2026

Locator: 50795INVESTING. 

Two comments with regard to linked article below:

• except for Liberty Energy, did you really expect other names than the first four?
• the "stock tips" were not the most interesting thing about this story -- the most interesting thing about this story was the headline -- "a post-Hormuz world." 
• suggesting that this may be the new normal -- "a post-Hormuz world," Iran controlling and perhaps monetizing the strait.  

I've been saying the same thing for a couple of weeks: 

Every day longer the strait is closed, it makes the Mideast that much less relevant. 

Investing: five oilfield services stocks built for a post-Hormuz world. Link here. Michael Kern.

• SLB
• HAL
• BKR
• RIG
• Liberty Energy (LBRT)

Liberty Energy:

Every list like this needs a name that makes readers stop and say “wait, really?” Liberty is that name. It is small, it does one thing, and it has zero exposure to the Middle East and total exposure to the North American shale rebound that all four of the other companies on this list are counting on to varying degrees.

Q1 beat expectations quite convincingly. Revenue of $1.02 billion was up 4% year over year, EPS of $0.06 significantly exceeded a consensus that had modeled a loss of $0.13, and the stock jumped nearly 10% on the print.

The underlying margin picture is less tidy: EBITDA of $126 million was down 25% year over year, reflecting the pricing pressure that has been grinding through North American completions for the better part of three years.

CEO Ron Gusek’s answer to that pressure is technology. The company has built a software platform called StimCommander that automates rate and pressure control across its fleets in real time, and a cloud-based optimization system called Forge that aggregates performance data to continuously improve efficiency.

But.

If the Permian recovery stalls, or if prices fall faster than expected once the Hormuz situation eventually resolves, Liberty is where the pain shows up most visibly.

There is no international business to cushion the blow, no long-cycle backlog to fall back on. But that same concentration, which creates the downside risk, is exactly what makes the stock interesting if the early-innings thesis is right.

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Locator: 50794B. 

Kratom: in the news. Link here. Etymology: Thai. 

Investing: five oilfield services stocks built for a post-Hormuz world. Link here. Michael Kern. 

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Back to the Bakken

WTI: $101.70.

New wells reporting:

• Wednesday, May 13, 2026: 27 for the month, 127 for the quarter, 284 for the year, 
• 42197, conf, Kraken, Apollo 18-7-6 7H, 
• 41451, conf, Devon Energy, Wagenman 32-29 5H, 
• Tuesday, May 12, 2026: 25 for the month, 125 for the quarter, 282 for the year, 
• 42262, conf, Petro-Hunt, John Williams 143-97-5B-8-3H, 
• 42199, conf, Kraken Operating, Turbodiesel 19-30-31-9H, 
• 41591, conf, Hess, EN-Trout-157-93-3130H-5,
• 41450, conf, Devon Energy, Wagenman 32-29 4H, 

RBN Energy: in a year of change, market fundamentals are key to understanding what comes next. Link here. Archived.

It’s been quite a year already — and we’re only four and a half months in! We began 2026 with energy markets looking very well supplied, with commodity prices generally expected to soften in the short term. But things quickly changed, first as a result of U.S. intervention in Venezuela, then much more dramatically with the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Prices have surged for crude oil, natural gas, NGLs, refined products and petrochemicals, along with the multitude of consumer products that utilize those feedstocks. Fortunes have been made (and lost) as a result. To survive such swings, you need a deep understanding of the fundamental forces impacting markets so that you can anticipate, identify and act on their secondary and tertiary effects. That’s the subject of today’s RBN blog and the focus of our upcoming School of Energy: Foundations, set for September 9-10 in Houston. Fair warning, today’s blog serves as an unabashed advertorial for the conference.

The swings in the global energy market have been significant so far in 2026, with the U.S. playing a pivotal role. There is no shortage of information and analysis out there, some of it seemingly contradictory. So, how do you know what data is important, which indicators to watch, and how to apply it all? Learning how to identify and analyze that information is what School of Energy is all about. To see how those pieces can come together, let’s look at some recent examples.