Locator: 51565ARCHIVES.
September: huge month for dividends.
Must be a really slow day: top story seems to be Trump vs List Cook. Link here.
Breaking: Trump considering new sweeping tariffs on semiconductors and products that use semiconductors.
FedEx championship starts today. Atlanta, GA. Thirty players. That's it.
Hugging Face: to be acquired by Nvidia -- reports.
KEY:
Locator: 51564ARCHIVES.
Post two days ago. A very, very long article. Right now the full article is available. In a few days it will disappear. Highly recommend reading.
RBN Energy: commodity price swings reshape E&P earnings in 2Q26. Link here. Archived.
The second quarter of 2026 was a tale of two commodity markets for U.S. exploration and production companies. A 29% quarter-over-quarter increase in WTI oil prices to $92.53/bbl provided a more powerful tailwind for Oil-Weighted E&Ps, who experienced a pre-tax operating profit turnaround with a war-driven late Q1 price surge. In stark contrast, plunging natural gas prices wounded Gas-Weighted producers after bountiful Q1 results.
In today’s RBN blog, we review the Q2 2026 results of the 37 publicly traded E&Ps we cover and analyze the remarkably wide performance gap they reveal.
The oil price climb from the Iran conflict and a spike in natural gas prices driven by an unusually cold winter across the eastern U.S. combined to double the average pre-tax profits for our 37-company universe from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026 to $15.12/boe, the highest result since mid-2023.
The continuing rise in oil prices spurred another 31% increase in pre-tax operating profits in Q2 2026 to $19.83/boe, the richest since 2022.
Cash flow also reached a post-2022 peak, increasing 8% to $29.72/boe ). Upstream revenues rose 6% to $44.67/boe.
One would hope return to investors would reflect those results.
Locator: 51563PARTON.
When fires swept through the Great Smoky Mountains in 2016, killing 14 and displacing thousands, a local legend answered the call to help.
Dolly Parton, the country music luminary, who died this week at 80, offered $1,000 per month to families who had lost their homes in Sevier County. The money kept flowing for months, and the songwriter and star behind hits including “My Tennessee Mountain Home” ultimately sent $12.5 million back to the county where she was born.
Ms. Parton’s support for the fire victims was just one node in a constellation of charitable activities that distinguished her as one of pop culture’s most prolific philanthropists. With cash gifts, benefit concerts and telethons, Ms. Parton supported causes that included early childhood literacy, wildlife conservation and the development of the Covid-19 vaccine.
She became so effective at distributing her own money that the ultrawealthy asked her to distribute theirs. In 2022, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his future wife, Lauren Sanchez, gave Ms. Parton $100 million to distribute to causes of her choosing. And this summer, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce gave Ms. Parton’s Imagination Library $2 million to fund the distribution of children’s books.
And then there's this: this was in TWSJ yesterday -- link here --
Tag: bullet train
