Pelagic

I think missed in the news around Patriot batteries is Ben Wallace's statement yesterday that he's open to sending longer ranged missiles to Ukraine if Russia keeps targeting civilian infrastructure. Patriots are just part of a unified NATO message to knock off the attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. Also possibly a preemptive response to Russia acquiring ballistic missiles from Iran as a lot of the other air defense aid has focused on cost effective solutions to low altitude cruise missiles and drones.

Seeing this I can start to appreciate the marketing Ford is doing related to its Lightning pickup truck being able to power a home, a few were even used post Hurricane Ian. Imagine being able to feed power stored in your car's battery back into the grid and sell it during price spikes. Would likely curb some of the insane price spikes during calm and extreme cold conditions, a lot more small sellers coming online, and incentivize EV/Hybrid adoption as your car is now a backup option for home power. To be fair a lot of gas/diesel trucks come with an AC outlet option that can use the engine as a generator too - mainly for using tools at a jobsite. https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/f150-lightning/features/intelligent-backup-power/

How does power pricing work for the individual home owner there? Are you incentivized somehow to use less during peak demand or is that peak demand pricing paid by the utility company and they subsidize somewhat their customers at an average rate?

Yeah, the price per kg to solar orbit is absurdly expensive. And where do we draw the line on what get's disposed of conventionally and what get's shot into space? Are we loading up barrels of heavy water and sending them into the sun too? There are lots of great solutions for dealing with waste, and none of the realistic ones involve launching it into solar orbit. Nuclear waste isn't anywhere near as big of a problem as people make it out to be and most of the issues surrounding it here in the US arise from uneducated legislators that don't want it in their backyard. This thread gives a pretty good overview of the current storage solutions here in the US, and how they differ from those in Europe.

EU politicians have been accused of not understanding energy and yet this proposal almost seems like they do understand it and aren't interested in touching it. They've crafted a policy that gives the appearance of legislating without actually doing much if anything. I doubt we'll see the same frenzied buying at any price we saw earlier this year as countries outbidded each other to fill reserves before winter.

They're subsonic cruise missiles that fly mainly at low altitude to avoid detection, at almost 50 years old they're not particularly novel technology. Ukraine claims to be knocking down ~80% or so of incoming missiles in the last few attacks with recently donated NASAMS systems performing quite well against them. Still, a barrage of 100 missiles leaves 20 or so that hit targets and inflict significant damage. Iranian ballistic missiles, if/when they're acquired, will be more difficult to deal with. A good video of a low altitude intercept. Russian strategy seems reminiscent of the early days of strategic bombing in WWII where if you send enough bombers, some are bound to get through and cause damage to civilian infrastructure. Maybe this particular empty missile was fired as a decoy to draw fire from active missiles or it was just a Russian commander needing to claim they launched x number of missiles and didn't have enough so converted that one into service, who knows.

Haha that's what I figured. I read this ONEW thesis when I first started researching it and it had some nuance as to why it's preferrable to HZO and talks a bit about HZO specifics as they compare to ONEW. https://valueinvestorsclub.com/idea/ONEWATER_MARINE_INC/0521948621

Any chance you could share a synopsis of their short thesis?

I think broadly speaking you're right. But there's a handful of factions within NATO that can be categorized by their support for Ukraine, and this extends to factions within member states as well. They range from direct military intervention in Ukraine to let Ukraine kill Russians until the last Ukrainian. So far the US has taken a more restrained approach fearing more involvement and aid on their end could provoke Russia even more evidenced by them not providing things ATACAMs, fighter aircraft, western main battle tanks, etc. Poland on the other hand has been one of the factions calling for NATO to do more to aid Ukraine. If it turns out Russian missiles struck Poland and killed Polish citizens, the Polish faction's voice becomes a lot louder and more insistent on the point of giving Ukraine what it needs to win. At the absolute minimum I think we see a bubble of NATO air defense that extends over western Ukraine and takes a proactive approach to shooting down anything Russian that comes near the Polish border.

More and more I'm starting to think this war is going to be won 50 miles at a time. Russia doesn't have an answer to HIMARS and simply doesn't have the road logistics to support the kind of force it has that relies heavily on mass artillery. They can bring supplies to within 50 miles or so of the front by train but from there they don't have an answer to actually getting sufficient quantities to the front and can't sustain heavy operations against Ukraine. Having a defensive line along the Dnipro now frees up a lot of Ukrainian troops that were in Kherson for a push south toward the Sea of Azov starting somewhere in the Zaphorizha region. The goal being to sever the rail line in southern Ukraine that Russia has access to. Combined with the destruction of the Kerch bridge, it will starve Russian forces in Crimea and southern Ukraine. It will take time, and Ukraine isn't likely to commit forces to a large scale urban battle where they'd sustain heavy losses, but they'll simply keep doing what works, degrading Russian forces within range of HIMARS and their artillery until they retreat. Ukraine is starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I'd strongly disagree. The bridges across the Dnipro had already been under Ukrainian fire from HIMARS for several months before the Kerch bridge attack. Supplying forces on the west bank was difficult but not impossible for Russia before October. Once the Kerch bridge was damaged it compounded an already bad situation. Yes, there is a route through southern Ukraine but it adds days to already strained Russian logistics in the region. There's no easy replacement for the heavy rail traffic that came across the Kerch bridge. Whether Russia decides to destroy the dam at Nova Khakhovha on their way across remains to be seen. What is certain is they have little to no means of transporting a lot of their armored vehicles across the Dnipro. The throughput of the barges they have in service is simply too little for the number of vehicles and troops that need to cross.

Russia withdrawing from the Kherson region on the west side of the Dnipro river. Looks like taking out the Kerch bridge and months of HIMARS strikes made holding Kherson untenable.

This article really went off the rails toward the end lol Let's say the most likely scenario next week is Reps win the house and senate is split 50/50. That doesn't exactly strike me as a drill baby drill outcome. Even a Rep majority in the senate likely doesn't benefit oil companies as much as the author hopes.

I think he's using strip pricing in his model for European gas since even at relatively low WTI/AECO prices of $70/4.5 he has VET at $138. Would also explain why VET is kind of an outlier on his price targets sheet relative to current price since Euro gas affects it a lot more than the other Canadians he covers. Thanks for the podcast link, it was quite informative.

I think his VET target is north of $140 actually lol Interesting that his personal portfolio is 50% ITM VET calls and he owns no VET in the White Tundra portfolio. https://www.whitetundra.ca/pricetargets

Some good insight into the death spiral of Venezuelan production in this article. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/venezuelas-oil-partners-head-exit-forgoing-unpaid-debt-2022-10-27/

This is an interesting thread on the use of Iranian made drones in Ukraine. It gets into the weeds on the cost of the drones vs. the cost of anti air systems currently available to Ukraine. At $20-40k a piece the drones, even when intercepted, are using up missile stockpiles that are each 10x or more their cost. Ukrainians are very capable and on the issue of defending civilian infrastructure have almost total support from the West so it's likely just a matter of time until their 80% interception rate increases to closer to 100%. It seems they're working on their own version of the Shahed-136 as well.

They're a bit different, retailer vs. manufacturer. Mainly the growth runway ONEW has available to it. They're executing well and have just under a 100 locations currently out of ~4,300 marine retailers so there's quite a bit of room to grow. And I can appreciate their strategy of letting dealerships retain some independence in terms of branding as opposed to MarineMax where a bad experience with one MarineMax can sour a customer to all locations. They also target higher end buyers in what's already a high end industry so in that sense the service revenue they take in at their dealership locations is meaningful and going to help reduce some of the cyclicality of boat sales. Couple that with experienced management and high insider ownership and I think there's a good chance to do well here. There's definitely risk regarding higher rates, and used boats flooding the market from 20/21 era buyers finding they liked the idea of boating better than actually owning a boat. However, if the goal is rolling up mom and pop retailers who are looking for an exit, a slowdown in sales likely let's them make those acquisitions at more attractive prices. Some background on the retailer side of the industry, there's a partial paywall but what's available for free is quite good. https://inpractise.com/articles/onewater-marine-and-boat-retailing https://inpractise.com/articles/onewater-marine-boat-manufacturer-and-dealer-relationship

ONEW. Been holding off on buying this for a while finally decided to grab some today.

Check out One Water. Both it and MarineMax should do well, ONEW has higher insider ownership and is executing very well. It's a large and highly fragmented industry, something like 4300 independent boat dealerships in the US. Plenty of room for HZO and ONEW to execute a roll-up strategy of independent dealers.

This is one of the clearest videos of what an operation in this war looks like that I've seen. And also reinforces just how useful consumer grade drones can be on the modern battlefield. You can turn on English subtitles for a decent translation.

Because if I'm reading Russian sources I might as well read first and second hand accounts to get a sense of their perspective of how things are going rather than a guy in the West writing Russian fan faction.

Plenty of translated pro-Russian sources on telegram and twitter if you want to go down the rabbit hole. They're a heck of a lot more sober about Russia's capabilities and realistic about its losses in the last few weeks than ZH.

This article is absolute nonsense. There's zero indication the original push into Kherson was anything more than a strategic feint to tie up Russian forces and enable Ukrainian operations around Kharkiv. And as of today Ukraine is making significant progress in the Kherson region. The article is ironically more pro-Russian than most Russian military telegram accounts in the way it hand waves away losses by saying the line was only held by LNR/DPR forces, and discounts the strategic importance of Ukrainian success in places like Izium. Not to mention the significant captures of Russian materiel which help enable further Ukrainian operations. There's also no indication Ukrainian offensives will stop during the winter, especially in the south. I'd imagine a well equipped Ukrainian military will be all to eager to press their advantage against freezing underequipped conscripts. Or that NATO is running out of supplies to send to Ukraine - the opposite is more likely as Ukrainian success has NATO member's which have provided relatively little support (France) trying to jump on the bandwagon and send more. What happens when the below paragraph doesn't happen? Will anyone stop reading ZH and call it out as pro-Russian nonsense?

Digging a little deeper, the timeline of events is interesting if you're blaming a sophisticated state actor. Why the delay between leaks? Something like 17 hours elapsed between the leak being detected in one of Nordstream 2's pipelines and then both pipelines of Nordstream 1 leaking. If you're sending divers or a submersible down with explosives in a targeted attack why leave anything up to chance, just set a timer and coordinate everything to blow at once. And again, why would you sabotage 3 out of 4 of the pipelines, leaving the second Nordstream 2 line intact? I have to imagine if the US was involved they would have made damn sure to take out both NS 2 lines and certainly have the capabilities to take them all out simultaneously.