Clearing Out The In-Box -- December 7, 2021

Saudi Arabia:

• needs $100-oil to pay for $1 million missiles to shoot down $10,000 "flying lawn mowers" targeting oil fields and infrastructure. Link here.
• monetizes pipeline for $15.5 billion; Blackrock buys in; link here;

Global warming:

• St Petersburg: sets all-time cold record for this day in history; - 21°C; previous record set in 1893.

AAPL:

• $2.7 trillion market cap;
• JP Morgan says iPhone 13 demand "healthy"; link here.
• one analyst suggest Apple will sell 300 million iPhones next year (2022); record some years ago was 230 million; needs to be fact-checked

COP: Michael Fitzsimmons over at SeekingAlpha. I agree with everything he says. Almost everyone replying says the same thing: buybacks are worthless for investors. 

Geopolitics: Biden administration reportedly mulls "nuclear option," i.e., disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT payment system in case they invade Ukraine. Likely outcome:

• WTI to $500
• Wheat to $50/bushel
• by the way, it looks like Russia's wheat crop this year is not doing well at all; previously posted. What was the bread basket of the USSR? Okay, the dots are starting to connect. 
• current US price for wheat: $8 / bushel 
• by the way, this talk about disconnecting Russia from SWIFT was already "a thing" back in May, 2021, when the European Parliament passed a resolution to do just that; link here.
• sounds like Brandon doesn't have many original ideas of his own; extends back to law school, some might say
  

Peak oil: recurrent them on the blog -- OPEC+ may be hitting oil production limits; more and more stories of same. today, from Energy Intelligence, Russia may be hitting oil production limits.

AAPL, again:

• one of the four safest dividend stocks; listed first at this Motley Fool article;

MSFT:

• being touted as "company of the year (2021)"
• market cap at $2.44 trillion; one strategist says MSFT could have $3-trillion market cap by mid-2022;
• AAPL market cap today: $2.71 trillion
• AAPL reportedly increasing iPhone shipments by 30% in 1H22; link here.
• company's goal: 300 million+ iPhone shipments in 2022
• talk of a bigger year overall fueled by the iPhone 14 to be released in the fall of 2022;

A bunch of hot air? Not really; also used to cool MRI scanners. Update on helium. Hottest commodity play of 2022? Link to Tom Kool. These stories surface every three-to-five years.