Looking Forward To A New Week -- First Full Week In June -- Third And Last Month 2Q23 -- What We'll Be Watching -- June 4, 2023

Locator: 44838B.

North Texas / DFW: an incredible evening! On a scale of one to ten, an eleven. No wind. Minimal cloud cover; pink sky in the west. 77°F right now. On the patio / balcony. Listening to folks in the pool.

Focus on fracking: pending.

For me, stories I'm watching:

• the market: will it hold after the 700-point surge in the Dow to close out May, 2023
• tonight, futures look good
• oil: where is it headed? Tonight, looking good.  
• Saudi makes unexpected announcement
  
• Tesla?
• Apple: WWDC -- keynote speech -- tomorrow, Monday, noon, CDT.
  
• AAPL: closed after reaching an all-time high last week; 
• watch to see if AAPL trends toward $185 or falls back to $170
  

WTI:

What's the "next big thing"?

Trending on my twitter feed tonight: link here. This speaks volumes. From The Bismarck Tribune. I knew the "number" would be high but I did not expect 80%! Quick: name the outlier: Walmart, Target, Bud.

Huge surprise. Early reports apparently were wrong.

• I said earlier that OPEC+ had caved. Saudi Arabia, apparently did not cave. Will unilaterally cut?

Playing hardball, link here:

From the linked article:

Saudi Arabia said Sunday it would cut 1 million barrels of oil a day as part of a deal between OPEC and its allies after one of the most contentious production meetings in recent years amid concerns over slowing global energy demand.

Saudi Arabia said the output cut was for July and on top of previously announced curbs, which would be extended until the end of 2024. The United Arab Emirates and some other large producers also extended their previously announced cuts.

The Saudi announcement came soon after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its Russia-led allies said the group had agreed to stick to current production targets until the end of the year. Each member of the cartel, called OPEC+, is allotted a production quota, but sometimes members don’t hit that level.

A production cut of as much as 1 million barrels a day was on the table, delegates had said ahead of Sunday’s meeting. The broader 23-member group accounts for close to half of the world’s oil output. A cut in production was expected to prop up crude prices amid concerns that a slowing global economy would crimp energy demand.

More:

Hog wash: debt ceiling bill, link here. Oh, give me a break. With the DOD going woke, the department has bigger problems than a cap on spending.

One word: Ukraine.

Sad story, link here.

************************
The Saudis

Playing hardball. Link here.

Today's one year view:

The five-year view is better and other time-spans also show how badly Saudi Arabia must be hurting.

OPEC+ Caves -- Maintains Production Cuts -- Saudi Goes It Alone — Will Cut More — June 4, 2023

Locator: 44837WTI.

Cava: to go public. [I thought this had already been announced.]

• link to The WSJ;
• a new Cava soon to open behind our apartment complex; along with about eight more restaurants.

Nicole Nguyen on Apple. Link here to The WSJ. Looking forward to this.

• SlashGear provides one answer (albeit, not a satisfying answer) why iPhone / iPad OS does not have native (Apple) calculator app;
• seems like an awesome opportunity for some software engineer.

Cleaning Out The In-Box -- Part 1 -- June 4, 2023

Locator: 44836INV.

US battery storage:

• updating y/y US battery storage; source story here.
• look at Texas: whoo-hoo!
  

NYISO: 

• forward power prices 60% lower y/y; link here.

Walmart:

• stays the course.
• no fanfare, no histrionics; no backtracking; stays true to their mission statement.
• still my favorite brick-and-mortar store, by far.
  

Healthcare investing:

19 best healthcare dividend stocks in which to invest. Link here. I do not know if companies were placed in any particular order:

• Johnson & Johnson; Pfizer, Merck, Abbott, Bristol Myers Squibb;
• Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca; GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi;
• Cardinal Health; AbbVie; Amgen;
• Gilead, Johnson Controls; Elevance Health;
• UnitedHealthGroup; Medtronic; Stryker

Baker Huges; link to The WSJ.

• aims to boost dividends; be more judicious with buybacks;
• great article; sounds like the CFO is listening to shareholders.

Dividend-paying tech stocks, three, The Motley Fool, link here. 

• Microsoft has a good claim on the pole position in AI and its revenue growth is reaccelerating. 
• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is a pick-and-shovel play on the growth in chip demand. 
• Equinix is a great way to play the growth in data centers. 

Best two FAANG stocks and one to avoid, link here to The Motley Fool;

• the top one being bought by billionaires: Netflix:
• and, the second: Alphabet (GOOG)
• avoiding like the plague: AAPL.

From the article, re: AAPL

To be clear, Apple is an amazing business. It's brought home close to $110 billion in operating cash flow over the trailing-12-month period, offers one of the largest nominal-dollar dividends in the world, has repurchased $586 billion of its common stock over the past decade, and is the clear-cut leader in U.S. smartphone market share.

But it's also a consumer-driven business that's struggling a bit. Through the first six months of fiscal 2023 (Apple's fiscal year ends in late September), Mac sales are down by 30% from the prior-year period, and iPhone revenue is down by $5.1 billion (about 4.2%). All PC makers have seen demand slow following the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which explains the weakness in Mac sales. Meanwhile, the iPhone 14 simply didn't offer enough differentiation from previous iterations to drive sustained sales growth.

Comparatively, services revenue hit a new record during the fiscal second quarter, but the rate of sales growth in services has slowed considerably in fiscal 2023.

Although Apple continues to be a cash cow, its valuation is a tough pill to swallow in a potentially weakening economic environment. Even with above-average inflation as a tailwind, sales are expected to decline 2.5% in fiscal 2023. Shares are also going for 30 times Wall Street's consensus earnings. That's a far cry from the price-to-earnings ratio of 10 to 15 Apple consistently traded between from the start of 2013 through 2018.

Apple stores: Apple planning 53 new or revamped Apple Store locations through 2027. Link here. 

There are 15 new stores coming to the Asia-Pacific region, five stores coming to Europe and the Middle East, and four stores coming to the U.S. and Canada

Another 28 stores in Asia, Europe, and North America will be revamped or relocated, with Apple working on the updates through 2027.

Three of the Asia-Pacific stores will be in India, one will be in Malaysia, two will be in South Korea, and one will be at the Jing'an Temple Plaza in Shanghai, with Apple also planning to overhaul its Shinsaibashi store in Osaka, Japan.

In Europe, Apple plans to upgrade its Paris Opéra location and open new stores at the Battersea Power Station in London and La Vaguada in Madrid.

Short sellers: link here. 

Short sellers have lost more than $13 billion betting against these 5 AI stocks this year.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. 

Again, all my posts are done quickly. There will be typographical and content errors in all my posts. If any of my posts are important to you, go to the source.

101 Days Of Summer -- Day 9 -- June 4, 2023

Locator: 44834B.

Today, day 9:

• biking weather, scale 1 - 10: a ten (10)
  
• might be a bit windy for swimming this afternoon.
  

Reading:

• The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer.

Sports:

• NASCAR
• PGA
• NBA championship
• NHL Stanley Cup

Link here:

Beating A Dead Horse -- But It's Important -- Is Biden Getting The Credit He Deserves? June 4, 2023

Locator: 44843TSLA. 
Locator: 44844TSLA. 

Again, the IRA MAGA.

Updates

June 4, 2023: even the least expensive Tesla Model 3 now qualifies for the full $7,500 tax credit. Link here. From the linked article:

If you're buying a Tesla Model 3 in the US, you can now get the maximum possible tax credit of $7,500 no matter what make you're getting.

Tesla has updated its website to show that the rear-wheel drive Model 3, along with its long range and performance counterparts, now qualify for the full federal tax credit for EVs. You'll also get to the enjoy the same amount of savings if you're buying the all-wheel, long-range or performance Model Y.

The US government issued a revised set of guidelines for which electric vehicles qualify for the federal $7,500 EV tax credit in March to comply with the Inflation Reduction Act rules the president signed last year. Under the new guidelines, which went into effect on April 18th, vehicles using battery components that are 50 percent made or assembled in the US qualify for a tax credit of $3,750. They can only get the full $7,500 credit if their manufacturer sources at least 40 percent of their critical minerals from the US or its free trade partners, which don't include China.

A lot of EVs were kicked off the list of vehicles qualified for credits when the change was implemented, but some were re-added in the days that followed. You could only subtract $3,750 from your taxes for Tesla's rear-wheel drive and long range Model 3 due to the new guidelines, but that's no longer the case.

It's not quite clear if Tesla altered the cars' batteries or found new suppliers to ensure that its new Model 3 deliveries meet the requirements for the new guidelines. But this means in some locations, you could get the standard version of the vehicle for just a bit more than $30,000 — or maybe even less than that if the state has its own perks for EVs.