Archive Category: Green Zone Fortunes PRO Updates

One second after midnight on January 1, 1946, a baby girl was born at St. Agnes Hospital in Philadelphia. Her name was Kathleen Casey. Her dad was a Navy machinist. Nobody threw a party. No reporters showed up. But Kathleen was leading a parade. Nobody knew it yet.

In late August, the crew at CVR Partners’ fertilizer plant in East Dubuque, Illinois, did something that looks crazy from the outside. They turned it off. No ammonia. No UAN. For 41 straight days, one of the company’s two plants made almost nothing to sell. And this was during a stretch when nitrogen prices were sitting well above where they were two years ago. This week, the bill came due.

Seven weeks ago, I told you a federal agency was about to decide whether one small refiner owed a $300 million bill. The answer came back. Mostly no. A few days after that issue, a list surfaced of the 29 refineries the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) let off the hook. Par Pacific’s Billings, Montana, refinery got a full exemption. Its plants in Tacoma, Washington, and Newcastle, Wyoming, got partial ones.

Back in July, when I first dug into Danaos Corp. (DAC), it wasn’t the dividend that caught my eye. It was the Quality numbers. Gross margin. Net margin. Return on assets, on equity and on invested capital. Those are the numbers that tell you whether a business really makes money, or just moves a lot of it around.

Stand up too fast, and the room tilts for a second. You grab the counter. It passes. Now imagine it doesn’t pass. Imagine your blood pressure drops so hard every time you stand that your vision goes gray and your legs give out. That’s daily life for many people with multiple system atrophy, a rare and devastating disease of the nervous system.