Mason Jones

Proud Texan, UArk alum, outdoorsman. Founder, Old San Jacinto. Trade, public equities, real estate. Texas market analysis at @SanJacintoCap.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@TraderSinnikov @unusual_whales Alaska does it. The Permanent Fund mails every resident a check. Texas has one too, but it pays universities and schools, not people.

The reason the country cannot is that the country does not own the oil. The rancher does. Norway owns every barrel.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@DSeleanu @unusual_whales That is Brent. Same list, bigger checks

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@c0mmon5en5e @unusual_whales And whatever Venezuela does produce is heavy crude that runs through Gulf Coast refineries. Still Texas money.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@TheLost2JZ @unusual_whales A third of it goes to A&M, so the football spending is at least diversified

[San Jacinto Capital @SanJacintoCap]

Key events this week:

1. SpaceX lockup, Monday: another 328 million shares become eligible to sell, four days after the 1.3 billion share release.

2. New home sales, Tuesday: Texas issues roughly one in seven single family permits in the country, so the national number is partly a Texas number. Waste Management and Baker Hughes, both Houston, report after the close.

3. Fed decision, Wednesday: oil above $100, the market having mostly priced out a hike, and Dallas Fed President Logan holding a vote. Phillips 66 and Prosperity Bancshares, Houston, report in the morning; Invitation Homes, Dallas, after the close.

4. Thursday morning, nine Texas earnings at once: D.R. Horton, Cheniere, Enterprise Products, Quanta, KBR, Builders FirstSource, Tenet Healthcare, Cullen/Frost and Caterpillar. September PCE inflation and Q3 GDP print the same morning.

5. Friday: ExxonMobil, Spring, and Chevron, Houston, close out a quarter in which Brent went to a six month high and the rig count did not move.

Sixteen Texas headquartered companies report earnings in four days.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

Read the flows against the returns.

$26 billion came in to $DRAM between April and July, almost all of it after the ETF was already up big, and it peaked at plus 190 percent in June. The ETF is still up 70 percent since launch and most of the people in it are down, because most of the money arrived at the top.

Not a memory chip story anymore really. That is every thematic ETF ever launched, and $RAM at 2x leverage is the same story told faster.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

Gold near records and 92 percent of the miners below their 50 day average is the whole case for owning the metal instead of the shovels.

The miners trade on diesel, labor, management and whichever country the mine happens to be in. The metal trades on central banks buying 79 tonnes a month. Different assets really.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

2.9 million in four days out of a record 19 million registered Texans, about 15 percent of the state before the first weekend.

For context, the whole 2022 midterm drew about 8.1 million votes total.

Early voting runs through Friday. Whatever the mix, the raw number is what a presidential year looks like, in a midterm, in a state that usually does not bother. Texas politics have a spotlight on them right now.

Hang in there y'all, only nine more days of these commercials.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

The first Russian diesel cargo under that deal is already on a tanker headed to New York, not Houston.

Gulf Coast refineries ran at near record rates last quarter and made $39 a barrel, so Texas does not need the diesel.

The East Coast does, and it is cheaper for New York to buy a foreign cargo than a Texas one, because a foreign ship cannot carry Texas diesel to New York under the Jones Act.

Russia is supplying the Northeast with what Houston would have sent if the law allowed it.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

A PEG of 0.1 on a memory company is not a bargain, that's a forecast.

The G in that ratio is next year's expected earnings growth, and memory earnings at a cycle peak have a way of not growing next year.

Micron has had a PEG under 0.5 at the top of every cycle in my lifetime.

The cheap ones on that list are cheap because the market does not believe the estimate, and on memory the market has usually been right.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@Mr_Derivatives Central banks bought 79 tonnes in August and have never once checked the RSI. The chart is for the people trading it. The price is set by the people who are not.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

Kinder Morgan ($KMI) just committed to a $4.2 billion pipeline for one customer.

Permian Link: 434 miles, 2.8 billion cubic feet of gas a day, under long term take or pay contracts with a hyperscaler that needs it for new power plants. Kinder's share is $1.6 billion.

In service third quarter 2030.

Read that date again. The gas is contracted four years before the first electron. Meanwhile the Central Texas laterals already sold to data center and industrial customers turn on late this year and late next.

So the gas is spoken for.

What is not: the grid connections, which ERCOT has paused for review, the water, and the permits for the plants themselves.

The pipeline is the easy part. Everything that has to exist at the other end of it is the hard part.

What to watch next: ERCOT's data center audit is due to the PUC by December 10, and it decides which of the roughly 300 large loads in the queue are real.

Kinder just told you at least one of them is.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

Dallas has three stock exchanges now.

NYSE Texas opened last year by moving the old Chicago exchange to Dallas.

Nasdaq Texas opened this year and SpaceX dual listed on it the day it went public.

The Texas Stock Exchange, the only one of the three built from scratch, started trading October 5 and has ten companies and five ETFs just three weeks later.

The filing that published Friday shows why:
A company moving its listing to TXSE pays no entry fee and nothing for the first year. New York charges $325,000 to walk in the door.

The exchanges did not bring the companies. Texas has more Fortune 500 headquarters than any state, the exchanges showed up because the headquarters were already here.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

Why every cruise out of Galveston goes to Mexico.

An 1886 law called the Passenger Vessel Services Act says a foreign flagged ship cannot carry passengers from one US port to another without stopping in a foreign country in between.

Nearly every cruise ship on earth is foreign flagged, because the law also requires US built ships for domestic routes and the US has not built a large cruise ship in decades. Exactly one big one flies the American flag, and it sails Hawaii.

So Galveston, the fourth busiest cruise port in the country, sends 3 million passengers a year to Cozumel whether they wanted Cozumel or not. Alaska cruises stop in Canada for the same reason.

The ship has to touch a foreign dock before it can bring you home, and Cozumel is the closest one.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@JSeyff @wrightsbarbecue Hard to argue with that. Brisket, ribs, and beans under the red umbrella.

Proof accepted. That’s a proper tray.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@JSeyff @wrightsbarbecue Wright’s is legit. Bentonville has a couple places that punch above their weight.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@NickpxJ Absolutely. The void needs my opinions.

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@JIBONWEB3 @KobeissiLetter Much appreciated

[Mason Jones @MrMasonJ]

@Polymarket The thing worth stealing from an AI lab fits on a thumb drive.

The thing worth stealing from a chip fab weighs forty tons.

We built forty years of export law around the forty ton problem and forgot about the thumb drive.