Huge News! EPA Withdraws WOTUS Rule -- July 10, 2017

With Native Americans claiming ownership of all waterways across the US and the US Army Corps of Engineers not far behind, it was refreshing to see this headline: EPA officially withdraws WOTUS rule. From The Dickinson Press:

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers have filed an official proposal to withdraw the 2015 Waters of the U.S. Rule due to the concerns of rural America. EPA now begins a replacement rulemaking process re-evaluating the definition of WOTUS in the Clean Water Act and gathering input from stakeholders.

It would be nice if Congress would codify any new EPA rules under the Trump administration so they are not easily undone if he's a "one and done" president.

So glad Hillary is not running the EPA.

2Q17 Earnings

This is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or what you think you may have read here. If this is important to you, go to the source. There will be factual and typographical errors on this page. If something looks wrong, it probably is.
 

Earnings Calendar

Earnings for the current quarter will be reported at this page; the link will be on the sidebar at the right, under "Earnings Central." When we start to see earnings reports for any quarter, the "Earnings Central" link is moved to the top of the sidebar until the earnings season is over.

I don't have time to check/update earnings on all companies listed below. If you see one that I have missed, feel free to send it in (anonymous comment or by e-mail) and I will post it.

Much of this information is done in haste. I assume there are factual and typographical errors. It is for my personal use only. If this information is important to you, go to the source.

Note: by 4Q16 I lost a lot of interest in tracking earnings. I'm not sure where I will go with this page. In fact, there are more and more days when ... no, I won't go there. 

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CLR breaks even. Link here.  Shares up in after-hours trading.

NOG reports. From a press release --

• daily production increased 4% sequentially to average 13,794 barrels of oil equivalent per day in the second quarter, for a total of 1,255,280 boe
• Northern added 4.3 net wells to production during the second quarter of 2017
• the 6.2 net wells that Northern elected to participate in during the first half of 2017 have an estimated internal rate of return of approximately 30% at a $50 /bbl flat pricing assumption
• at June 30, 2017, Northern maintained a strong list of wells in process totaling 16.1 net wells that have an estimated internal rate of return of approximately 30% at a $50 /Bbl flat pricing assumption
• Northern's GAAP net income for the second quarter of 2017 was $13.8 million. Adjusted net income for the quarter was a loss of $0.2 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $30.7 million.

Disney: missed on revenues, $14.24 billion vs $14.42 billion; beats on earnings, $1.58 vs $1.55;  the bigger news is that Disney will pull its movies from Netflex, and will initiate a new streaming service that will take on Netflix. The new streaming service sounds a lot like TCM. Call it DCM -- Disney Classic Movies.

Denbury: a profit of less than one cent/share; beating a forecast of a loss of 2 cents/share.

Plug Power: a loss of 19 cents/share; adjusted, 10 cents/share; forecast, a lost of 7 cents/share.

CBS: beats on both top and bottom lines.

SM: EPS in line at 32 cents; compares to a loss of 44 cents year-ago quarter; total revenue decreased 65% to $121 million from $342 million a year ago.

BRK: operating earnings up $4.1 billion; book value up 6.2% ($182,816/shr).

ENB: misses; 30 cents vs 35 cents forecast; unadjusted earnings of 42 cents.

EPD: misses; 30 cents vs 33 cents forecast. Shares down during the day; rose after-hours. Motley Fool has positive story: grew year-over-year.

Enterprise kept its distribution growth rate the same with a 5.1% year-over-year payout increase. This was the 52nd consecutive quarter with a distribution increase.

The distribution coverage ratio slipped slightly in the quarter to 1.2, but that meant the company still retained $381 million in cash after distributions to reinvest in the business.

EEP: link here. 

EOG, AAPL, MDU: link here. 

PSX (Phillips 66): beat expectations; increased by about 11% y-o-y; second quarter in a row that the company reported an increase in earnings; EPS of $1.06 vs 93 cents previous quarter. A nice day to report; the market was surging (just shy of 22,000 on the Dow 30) and price of WTI was holding steady around $50. PSX shares were up over 2%.

Facebook: huge beat; shares surge.

XOM: miss estimates; shares hit 52-week low

CVX: beat estimates; shares up about 1.5%

Crescent Point Energy: net income of 11 cents; adjusted, 5 cents; compares to a loss in same period one year ago.

UNP: beats expectations but shares slump, significantly. Beat by 6 cents at $1.45.

EW: $1.08 vs forecast of 88 cents; huge; shares up over 3%. 

CMCSA: beats by 4 cents; 52 cents vs 48 cents forecast. Shares up over 3% in early morning trading.

COP: beats by 16 cents; conference call here; 

Hess: misses expectations of a loss of $1.32/share; in fact, earnings came in at a bigger loss, $1.46/share. However, Hess beat on revenues, coming in at $1.23 billion vs $1.19 forecast. 

Boeing: EPS beats forecast; forecast a profit of $2.32 from a loss of 44 cents/share a year ago; in fact, a profit increase of $2.55, huge beat; shares pop over 3% in pre-market trading;

Ford: beats by 13 cents; to 56 cents EPS; also beats on top line, $29.85 billion, beats by $0.13 billion.

McDonalds: beats on both top, bottom lines; EPS $1.70 vs $1.62; revenues, $6.05 billion, vs $5.96 billion;

CAT: huge beat on top, bottom lines; EPS 1.49 vs 1.25; revenues $11.33 billion vs $10.93 billion; reflects global economy; CAT up 5% pre-market;

GM: huge beat on EPS, 1.89 vs 1.69; but huge miss on revenues, $37 billion, vs  $40.15 billion

DuPont: beats on top and bottom line.

GOOG: huge quarter; revenues jumped 21% to $26 billion; after hours, shares plunge on EU fine of almost $3 billion; dropped 3% or $32 after-hours. Sharp jump in paid clicks, surged 52% year-over-year; biggest jump in at least seven years. But that comes with a cost: $5.1 billion in traffic acquisition costs, which was also a record high. Traffic acquisition costs outpaced revenue growth for the first time in five years. Traffic acquisition costs are what Google pays to drive people to its ads. For example, Google pays Apple when iPhone users search with Google. These costs have been rising as more of the company’s traffic comes from mobile devices. Operating income would have hit a record $6.9 billion if not for the record-setting $2.7 billion fine from the European Union. But that represents growth of only 15% year over year—the company’s slowest in two years.

Amazon: hits all-time high; up $13 (1.3%) today; now at $1,039.

Kinder Morgan: strong earnings report; will increase dividend by 60% for 2018 and 25% each year beyond to 2020; grew its backlog of projects to $12.2 billion, up $500 million;

Anadarko: shares down 3% after company posts wider-than-expected loss.  Lost 76 cents/share; will cut 2017 CAPEX by $300 million for full year.

Encana: shattered earnings; 34 cents vs 4 cents estimate

SLB: reports a loss of 5 cents; adjusted, earnings at 35 cents, topping forecast of 30 cents;

Honeywell: beats.

GE: shares plunge; sitting on terrible news.

VISA: easily beat both on earnings and revenues; volume growth up almost 40%

MSFT: easy beat on earnings; missed on revenues; investors happy; after-hours, shares up

UNP: $1.45 vs $1.39. 

T-Mobile: crushed earnings. Fastest growing carrier in the US.

Qualcomm: hits a speed bump. Profit plunges without royalties from Apple. Others says Qualcomm issues go beyond Apple. 

Morgan Stanley: beats on both top and bottom lines. July 19, 2017.

Crazy: United Airlines with huge beat on both earnings and revenue, but shares are down almost 3% after report; has to do with "involuntary denied boardings." July 18, 2017.

IBM: huge beat on earnings, but missed on everything else (revenues); IBM up slightly after earnings announced, July 18, 2017. 

Netflix soars. Posted here, July 17, 2017

Banks: mixed bag; nothing remarkable; minimal effect on the market; July 14, 2017

•  Well before 2012, I bought shares of BK for our older daughter. She still holds those shares.

OXY: will raise dividend by a penny; July 13, 2017

The Political Page, T+159, Wednesday, June 28, 2017

What a doofus   What's the plural of doofus? CNN blows it. And the link is at The Washington Post -- another fake news outlet.

The Political Page -- T+169 -- In Reply To "An Angry Reader" -- Vic Hanson -- July 8, 2017 -- The Political Page, T+169

Vic Hanson is now linked at the sidebar at the right. 

This was placed in draft a couple of days ago; now posted.

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This is from the Vic Hanson site, undated, sent to me from a reader.

A note to Vic Hanson from "An Angry Reader":

In your recent article you are off base, friend. Every day that passes proves Trump to be unfit in so many ways.

I figure a Trump believer to be either embarrassingly uninformed or purely hypocritical, willing to push a conservative agenda regardless of flag bearer. No doubt you are the latter…

If conservatism was more about fairness instead of protecting the wealth of the very rich, I might even go for that. Minus the current “leader”, of course.

Stop defending him; you clearly are too intelligent to believe he is worthy.

Bill Sellars

This is the reply from Victor Davis Hanson:

Dear Angry Reader Bill Sellars,

Is “friend” sarcastic? I don’t recall ever meeting a Bill Sellars. Congratulations, you met one of the angry reader criteria: ad hominem (“you are the latter….”) but are to be commended for omitting the usual exclamation marks, capital letters, and profanity.

In the fashion of Barack Obama’s “clingers” and Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” in your contempt, you are writing off half the country who voted for Trump. I have a number of friends and family members who voted for Hillary, and never resorted to the sort of ad hominem that you and the Left routinely embrace.

No candidate runs solo, but always against someone else. Hillary on every issue—higher taxes, more regulation, restrictions on gas and oil development, open borders, identity politics—was, to paraphrase Obama, on the wrong side of history. She was enmeshed in scandals, shamelessly breaking the law with a private server, destroying documents, trafficking in classified documents. The Wikileaks trove revealed the depths of corruption between her campaign and the sycophantic media. She and her husband had created a net worth of over $200 million, largely by leveraging her political career and offices to earn huge speaking fees, and donations to the foundation, which they manipulated as a source of free travel for themselves and sinecures for their hangers-on. Hillary is “very rich”, and her trajectory started at the beginning of Bill’s Arkansas career, when she leveraged her husband’s governorship to manipulate the cattle futures’ market, earning $100,000 on a $1,000 investment, at odds of over a billion to one.

The “very rich” are mostly liberals. Try looking at counties by per capita income and then look how they voted in the last three elections: your “very rich” are very liberal, largely because they have the capital and income to exempt themselves from the logical consequences of their own ideology. A case in point is socialist Bernie Sanders—with a million-dollar-income, three tony homes, and a wife under investigation for improperly arranging a sweet-heart loan (and she was instrumental in evicting the disabled from the new campus she purchased on her road to bankrupting her college). Why are Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street predominately progressives?

Conservatism is about three things: 1) respect for past traditions and customs and emphases on family, religion, and communities, 2) a growing market economy in which free market capitalism creates wealth that enriches everyone—in which one tolerates some inequality because the vast majority is not poor, rather than one being impoverished like everyone else (cf. Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, 3) a deterrent foreign policy that believes peace is a dividend of bad people being afraid of the consequences of their natural desire to try something stupid against stronger better people.

The Republican Party is mostly a middle class and upper-middle class party; the Democratic Party is now the domain of the subsidized lower middle classes and poor, and the hyper-rich. It despises the middle class for lacking the romance of the distant poor and the middle classes for their supposedly crass and tasteless culture.

Stop stereotyping: you may be too smart to mouth such ossified liberal talking points.

Vic Hanson

The Energy Page, T+171 -- July 10, 2017

Top states for business: at CNBC, starting tomorrow.

Active rigs in North Dakota:

$44.09	7/10/2017	07/10/2016	07/10/2015	07/10/2014	07/10/2013
Active Rigs	57	29	73	189	186

RBN Energy: Waha -- Part 4. Archived.

US rigs: huge headlines last week when US land rigs dropped by one (1). Today: Emergent Group says 8 rigs have been added since last report; now at 919 US land rigs. 

Natural gas in hyperdrive:

Cable: 90 million US households with cable television; nearly 80 million US households with Amazon Prime. First hear on radio this a.m. Here's one source.

US car sales. Sales rose less than expected in June. Data points:

• sales rose at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 16.51 million; forecast 16.58 million
• sales feel 13.2% year-on-year
• among the Big Three, only GM reported weaker-than-expected sales in June
• Toyota: up 2.1% (forecast, 1.2%)
• Nissan: up 2% (forecast, down 2%)
• Ford: down 5% (forecast, down 6%)
• Mazda: down 14.7%
• GM: down 4.7% (forecast, down 3.4%)
• Fiat Chrysler: down 7.4% (forecast, down 7.9%)
• Subaru: up 11.7%