Pioneer cuts workers and market cheers: Window dressing for a sale?

Saudis push OPEC to go for $70 a barrel

The goal was to cut production enough to reduce global oil inventories to their five-year average. The hope of the coalition of OPEC and Russia that reduction in production would get oil prices up to $60 a barrel. Now with that inventory reduction just about in place and with oil at $60 a barrel, the Saudis are pushing for further production cuts and a target price of $70 a barrel.

Pioneer cuts workers and market cheers: Window dressing for a sale?

Drilling productivity report highlights Permian as source of U.S. production growth

It’s not the most high-profile or best followed report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but if you’re looking to see where in the energy sector to put your dollars, the monthly Drilling Productivity Report is a good place to start. That’s because the report projects the trends in production per well in U.S. oil shale geologies and the growth in the number of working wells.

Pioneer cuts workers and market cheers: Window dressing for a sale?

The oddest thing about my top Black Swan pick for 2018 is that you can actually do something about it–and here’s how

Black swan events in the financial markets are terrifying. By definition they’re extremely rare and extremely difficult to predict. Which wouldn’t be so scary if their effects weren’t so catastrophic. A 10% drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500 would certainly be painful–but it doesn’t rise to the category of a black swan. Neither does a 15% drop in the price of Bitcoins. Or a 20% drop in the price of Apple (AAPL). All these are relatively normal negative events. They’ve happened before. They happen relatively frequently. And in some cases–that of Bitcoin or the S&P 500, for example–they’re absolutely statistically normal for the market or a part of the market or a specific asset. No, the label “black swan’ is reserved for things like the 2008 global financial crisis that almost brought the world’s financial markets and its real economies to their knees. Or the Dot.com crash of 2000, which saw corporate giants such as Nortel Networks disappear from the economic landscape. Or the oil price crash of 2008 that saw oil soar to a high of $147 a barrel in July and then plunge to $32 by December. Given how devastating to a portfolio a black swan event can be, it seems, at first, surprising that most lists of “bad things that could happen in the year ahead” pretty much ignore this type of financial event.

Saturday Night Quarterback says, For the next week expect…

Saturday Night Quarterback says, For the next week expect…

A very heavy week for earnings will reach a crescendo on Thursday, November 2 with reports from Alibaba and Apple. The excitement isn’t surprising after the huge earnings that Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), and Intel (INTC) delivered this past Thursday, October 26. This week Facebook (FB) is the Wednesday, November 1,  warmup act.