Pelagic

Quick clarification, the Trans Mountain line is already 300k/d the additional line being put in beside it will boost total volume to 890k/d for the two lines. https://www.transmountain.com/project-overview

Kaleidoscope on Netflix is excellent. Not entirely convinced the randomized episode order that was hyped so much is anything more than a gimmick though.

Is this a play on the trans mountain expansion or a more general normalizing of WCS differentials from $27 to something in the $15-20 range? Hard to get a sense of how much the expansion that should come online this year or early next is going to impact spreads. If they're lower than average to end the year thanks to the extra takeaway capacity it seems like it could be a big win for a lot of producers.

Up 13.5% Was a lot better in June so the second half of the year was a bit of a disappointment. Bought tech a bit early, Meta and Baba mainly, and could have taken some more profits in oil earlier. Also think I devoted too much mental energy to positions I never put a meaningful percent in. Twitter mainly, but some small speculative bets on RIG and BTU too. All made money but didn't ever put in enough to move the needle.

@Xerxes The US actually had very strict targeting rules during the Vietnam war, especially for targets in the North. The port of Haiphong for instance was often off limits entirely due to the fear of striking Russian ships in port. Likewise for airfields in North Vietnam close to the Chinese border from which North Vietnamese fighter aircraft took off from. The use of air power in Vietnam is interesting, you have quite a few factions within the US command structure with different priorities and thought processes. Suffice to say, anything that moves was most certainly not a target, much to the chagrin of American airmen facing the same MiGs and SAM sites day after day that they couldn't target. Linebacker II in 1972 was impactful (to the extent it was) because it was when Nixon let strategic air command have their way to execute bombings against infrastructure that they had wanted to target all war long. This is a very good lecture on the topic.

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.