- The Finance Gourmet

How Much Does It Cost to Charge an Electric Car In Colorado?

June 30, 2024 by Finance Gourmet

Real world cost to charge an electric car in Colorado using current Xcel Energy rates. Somewhere along the lines, the entire country got divided into liberals and conservatives and the one hates the other one and thinks they are trying to ruin the country, and vice versa. Of course, once you get off of Twitter or whatever online/social media/internet/news website thing there is and get out into the real world where the sun shines, and people actually buy cars and drive them to work and stuff, things aren’t really that crazy. Out here in the real world, you might wonder if you live in Colorado how much it would actually cost you to charge an electric car. Let’s find out. I Bought an Electric Car and I Charge It at Home I’m not a political nutjob, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Just kidding. I am a regular guy though, and I did buy an electric car. Why? Why not? I like cool new technology and electric cars are cool new technology. Regular cars have basically run the same for over a hundred years now. Dig black goo up out of the ground, and burn …

Baker Hughes Stock Buyback from GE

July 30, 2021 by Finance Gourmet

So, weird little bit of financial news today. There are a couple of moving parts, so let’s get those out of the way first. Last summer in July 2020, GE announced that intended to “fully monetized” its stake in Baker Hughes over the next three years. Fully monetize is lingo for sell. Earlier this year, GE said it sold $1 billion worth of Baker Hughes during the second quarter. GE also announced that it planned to sell another $1.3 billion worth of BKR during the third quarter. That brings us up to date. Baker Hughes announces a $2 billion stock repurchase program In part, the idea behind the share buyback is that Baker Hughes is using some of the profits it has reaped recently thanks to a recovering economy and a carefully controlled quota by OPEC. Buying $2 billion worth of stock would essentially soak up the $2 billion that GE is selling right now. In a world where supply and demand are the only factors that impact a stock’s price, GE’s selling would be pushing the price of BKR down. You can kind of see that in the April to May dip in BKR. Assuming that BKR sold its …

Energy Stocks Up In 2021 Article

January 14, 2021 by Finance Gourmet

As a freelance finance writer, I get a steady feed of financial news stories and articles. I thought I would share this one from investors.com. Headlines Matter A lot of financial writers are under instructions to post something every day, or even several times a day. Under those circumstances, they can’t all be diamonds, but this one about 2021’s runaway sector, is cracking me up. For those of you not paying attention, today is January 14. That just the 9th trading day of the year (New Year’s Day is a holiday, plus weekends). So the sector that’s running away “so far” in 2021 is not exactly a meaningful time period. Why Are Energy Stocks Up? Saudi Arabia announced it would cut production. As the world’s largest oil producer, that is big news to the energy markets and resulted in oil prices rising, even though Russia says that it will increase production because it doesn’t want U.S. shale oil markets benefiting from the higher prices. Whatever higher oil prices happens to trickle through is good news for U.S. oil producers, hence the quick runup in the last few days to make it the “runaway” sector for 2021… so far. My favorite …

What Does Oil Crash Mean for My Investments?

April 23, 2020 by Finance Gourmet

The expiring May oil contract trading for less than $0 made big headlines, but what is zero-dollar oil, and what does it mean for your investment portfolio? Zero Dollar Oil The trick to oil contracts, unlike similar stock options is that execution requires the delivery of a physical good. If you buy 100 options for IBM stock, on the day the contract expires, they put shares of IBM stock in your brokerage account. Obviously, this requires no effort, nor ability to “store” those shares somewhere. When an oil contract expires, its owner has to take possession of the barrel of oil. That doesn’t actually mean that an investor drives up a truck and loads it with barrels of oil. Instead, there are numerous storage and refinery facilities where that oil can usually be directed. However, as the May contract came up for expiration, there wasn’t any room for storage (which isn’t free), and there is no demand at the refineries, so investors were looking at having to take delivery of a good that they had no place to put, and no use for. In this case, it actually would cost such an investor less to dump his contract for pennies, …

Trump, Iran, and the Markets

April 22, 2019 by Finance Gourmet

The stock markets aren’t sure what to do anymore about Donald Trump. As it turns out, many of the things the market thought would be devastating (trade war with China) weren’t as big of deal as originally thought. Add to that the fact that Trump changes his mind on a regular basis for no particular reason, and you have a stock market that just sort of guesses. Big news today is that the Trump administration is pulling the waivers for countries over the Iran oil sanctions. Say what? So, Trump decided he had some sort of goal with Iran that involved oil sanctions against Iran. Typically, this is what American Presidents do when they are upset with Iran. Rather than bombing them, you cut off their ability to sell oil The catch is that the world oil market is really one big pool of suppliers and cutting any of the supply into that pool raises oil prices. Most countries, especially America, aren’t real fond of higher oil prices, so the sanction thing is sort of a double-edged sword. Enter waivers. When the Trump administration put its sanctions on Iran, they made sure to tell everyone, because that is how you …

Oil Price Fun (11/2018)

July 16, 2023November 9, 2018 by Finance Gourmet

I’ve been swamped so I haven’t been able to update on here as often as I would have liked these past couple weeks, which is a shame because there is tons of interesting stuff going on out there, plus end of year stuff coming, and so on. I’m on it. Don’t worry. In the meantime, my favorite story of the past few weeks is oil prices. Since this time late year, oil prices have been trending higher (with the usual ups and downs). Since June of this year, oil was basically stuck between $65 per barrel and $70 per barrel. That price range might be considered the “real” oil price, or the non-panicked oil price based upon an established equilibrium of supply and demand. Then, Trump started talking about sanctions on Iran, and prices started climbing, topping out at over $76 per barrel. This is because taking Iran’s oil supply off of the world market would decrease supply with no corresponding decrease in demand. But, what Trump shouts and what he actually does don’t always match up, and the administration basically granted sanction waivers for all of Iran’s biggest customers including China. That means that the supply is not decreasing, …

Oil Drops Below $50 Again – Now What?

April 21, 2017 by Finance Gourmet

Not long ago, I posted about how oil prices would never see anything near $100 a barrel again, because as soon as prices started climbing above $50 or $60, U.S. producers would crank up previously idled oil fields, and that is just what happened. With OPEC’s oil production cut earlier this year, prices indeed did start rising, and U.S. producers turned the pumps back on. Prices have made it back up in to the fifties. Today, however, prices slipped back below $50 per barrel ahead of a report on U.S. oil rig count that most analysts predict will show even more U.S. production coming online. Couple that with uncertainty about whether OPEC — and Russia — will extend their supply cuts, and you have investors nervous that prices have nowhere to go but down. Oil Prices and U.S. Stock Prices The reality is that, for America, $50 per barrel is a pretty happy medium spot. At $50 per barrel, oil value is high enough for most U.S. producers to make a profit, and for banks to continue feeling good about credit backed by oil reserves. Together, this keeps the stocks of S&P 500 companies like Exxon and Shell and so …

OPEC Deal and the U.S. Stock Market

December 1, 2016 by Finance Gourmet

For the past few years, the strategy of OPEC has been to do nothing while Saudi Arabia pumps oil as fast as it can into the market. The idea was to cripple, or drive out of business, various U.S. oil businesses that depend on more expensive extraction methods such as fracking. With prices low, many of those businesses did indeed go into hibernation and most new drilling was curtailed. However, that still leaves tons of capacity sitting idle, waiting for higher prices before flipping the switch back on. OPEC Deal It has become apparent that overproduction will not drive out U.S. oil businesses. It seems a strong U.S. economy, plus a more disciplined approach to lending and spending has left most American producers able to hold out for higher prices for longer than the cartel may have hoped. As a result, the cheap oil is actually causing more trouble for oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia that depend on oil production to fund their government. So, for the first time in over 7 years, the 14 OPEC countries have reached a deal to reduce production. The new deal calls for a reduction of 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, with …

Are Oil Loans the New Subprime Mortgages

April 12, 2016 by Finance Gourmet

Remember when banks got too greedy with subprime mortgages? Remember when banks (and their executives) just couldn’t say no to the massive earnings (and by extension massive bonuses) that came from building bigger and riskier portfolios of subprime loans? Well, get ready for oil loans. Oil Loans and Bank Risk If you think Wall Street and the big banks learned their lesson from the subprime loan driven banking crisis, you really don’t understand how compensation works in the financial industry. You see, bonuses are paid based on big gains. This encourages risk taking. However, there is no downside for being wrong on those big risks, not even losing some of the bonus you earned earlier in the year. As a result, risk is the name of the game at Wall Street’s big banks. This time, banks rushed to lend money to companies in the oil industry when prices where high. In addition, they extended very generous lines of credit to those same companies on pretty sweet terms. Just like with the subprime mortgage crisis, as long as oil prices didn’t fall too far, too fast, everything would be fine. Deja vu. With oil prices at low levels, and any oil …

Why Cheaper Oil Hurts Stocks

January 6, 2015 by Finance Gourmet

There is a lot of new lately about lower oil prices hurting the stock market. This comes as a shock to casual investors who are used to HIGHER oil prices hurting the stock market. If lower oil prices are good for consumers, and the consumer drives the American economy, then why would lower oil prices hurt stocks? Short-Term Stock Price Movements First, never forget that short-term stock price movements are much more about speculators maneuvering for quick profits than about the actual value or prospects of the stocks in question. One way to calculate a company’s value is it’s market capitalization which is the number of shares outstanding the company has times the company’s share price. As I write this, for example, IBM has a market capitalization of $154.76 billion dollars. However, it’s stock is down approximately $3 per share from yesterday. That means that, theoretically, the company was worth $157.85 billion dollars yesterday. No matter what the price of oil is, there is no way that anything changed enough to make IBM worth $3 billion dollars less than yesterday. Short-term price fluctuations are the result of supply and demand. And, since a large majority of daily trades are actually between computers, …