If you are looking for the best ideas for your portfolio you may want to consider some of Mott Capital's top stock picks. Mott Capital, an investment management firm, is bullish on Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock. In its Q4 2019 investor letter – you can download a copy here – the firm discussed its investment […]

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If you are looking for the best ideas for your portfolio you may want to consider some of Mott Capital's top stock picks. Mott Capital, an investment management firm, is bullish on Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) stock. In its Q4 2019 investor letter – you can download a copy here – the firm discussed its investment […]

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(Bloomberg) — The Dakota Access pipeline must shut down by Aug. 5, a district court ruled Monday in a stunning defeat for the Trump administration and the oil industry.The decision, which shuts the pipeline during a court-ordered environmental review that’s expected to extend into 2021, is a momentous win for American Indian tribes that have opposed the Energy Transfer LP project for years. It comes just a day after Dominion Energy Inc. and Duke Energy Corp. scuttled another project, the Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline, after years of legal delays.Environmentalists have increasingly used the courts to try to block additional investment in fossil fuel infrastructure while they push for a clean energy transition. Tribes, landowners, and other project opponents have also complained about local impacts from construction and potential spills on or near their land.The sophisticated legal onslaught has led to delays and disruptions for numerous other proposed and operational pipelines, including Keystone XL. But Monday’s court order, if upheld on appeal, marks the first time a major, in-service oil pipeline will be forced to shutter because of environmental concerns.‘Historic Day’The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said a crucial federal permit for Dakota Access fell too far short of National Environmental Policy Act requirements to allow the pipeline to continue operating while regulators conduct a broader analysis the court ordered in a previous decision.The ruling scraps a critical permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, and requires the pipeline to end its three-year run of delivering oil from North Dakota shale fields to an Illinois oil hub. Judge James E. Boasberg said Dakota Access must shut down the pipeline and empty it of oil by Aug. 5.“Today is a historic day for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many people who have supported us in the fight against the pipeline,” tribal Chairman Mike Faith said in a statement. “This pipeline should have never been built here. We told them that from the beginning.”The Army Corps referred questions about the ruling to the Justice Department, which didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, including on whether it intends to appeal the ruling.Energy Transfer also didn’t immediately respond. The company’s shares fell as much as 7.7% on Monday while most other pipeline operators rose.Continental Resources Inc., the shale producer founded by Harold Hamm, another prominent Trump supporter, also fell on the decision, as did Hess Corp. Both companies have significant operations in the Bakken shale field, and a shutdown of Dakota Access will make it harder for them to pipe their crude out of the basin.“The decision is likely to be enormously disruptive,” said Katie Bays, co-founder of Washington-based Sandhill Strategy LLC. The Army Corps’ 18-month timeline for addressing flaws in its environmental review makes Energy Transfer “vulnerable to a change in administration and a more draconian policy towards oil pipelines,” she said.Southern Methodist University law professor James Coleman said the ruling “just totally overturns that conventional wisdom” that courts will never force in-service pipelines to shut down.Years of OppositionBoasberg’s decision comes after four years of litigation from tribes opposed to Dakota Access’ route across Lake Oahe, a dammed section of the Missouri River just a half-mile from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in the Dakotas.The Standing Rock Sioux, Cheyenne River Sioux, and others sued the Army Corps for approving the water crossing in 2016, saying it put tribal water supplies and cultural resources at risk.Their frustrations triggered an outpouring of support from fellow tribes, indigenous advocates, and environmentalists from across the country. Thousands of pipeline opponents camped out in North Dakota for months to show their opposition.The Obama administration responded by withholding a final permit and committing to a new consultation process, but President Donald Trump quickly put Dakota Access back on track after taking office in 2017.Kelcy Warren, the billionaire chief executive officer of Energy Transfer, has long been a Trump fan. He recently hosted a fundraiser for the president’s re-election campaign at his private Dallas home.“My God, this is going to be refreshing,” Warren told investors two days after Trump won the last election.Despite high-profile opposition to Dakota Access, including from celebrities and some of Warren’s favorite musicians, the Energy Transfer founder has stood by the project, going so far as to say he talks about Dakota Access “like I talk about my son” earlier this year.“I’m so proud of that project,” he said.Trouble in CourtBut the district court in Washington found flaws in the government’s pipeline approval process. Boasberg ordered the Army Corps to conduct additional environmental review in mid-2017, but allowed the pipeline to remain in service during that time.Earlier this year, the court again identified shortcomings in the Army Corps’ review, concluding that the agency didn’t fully consider expert disagreement over the risk of an oil spill in Lake Oahe. The Army Corps must do an in-depth environmental impact statement for Dakota Access, the judge said.Boasberg issued the opinion in March and ordered both sides to submit new briefs explaining whether the pipeline should shut down in light of the decision.The default consequence for an agency violation of the National Environmental Policy Act is invalidation of the permit at issue, but legal precedent allows courts to balance that outcome against other factors, including how disruptive nixing a permit would be, and how likely an agency is to support its original decision after additional analysis.The Army Corps has said it expects to finish the court-ordered analysis in mid-2021.The case is Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. Army Corps of Engineers, D.D.C., No. 1:16-cv-01534, 7/6/20.To contact the reporter on this story: Ellen M. Gilmer (Bloomberg Law) in Washington at egilmer@bloombergindustry.com and Rachel Adams-Heard (Bloomberg News) in Houston at in Houston at radamsheard@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory Henderson at ghenderson@bloombergindustry.com; Chuck McCutcheon at cmccutcheon@bloombergenvironment.com; Anna Yukhananov at ayukhananov@bloombergindustry.com(Additional reporting throughout.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Every investor in Cloudera, Inc. (NYSE:CLDR) should be aware of the most powerful shareholder groups. Large companies…

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How do you pick the next stock to invest in? One way would be to spend days of research browsing through thousands of publicly traded companies. However, an easier way is to look at the stocks that smart money investors are collectively bullish on. Hedge funds and other institutional investors usually invest large amounts of […]

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It may be time to lighten the load on stocks. Here's what Goldman Sachs just signaled.

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The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey is again at the forefront when it comes to making use of this gold mine of data. We at Insider Monkey have plowed through 821 13F filings that hedge funds and well-known value investors are required to file by the SEC. The 13F […]

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Yahoo Finance’s Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer joins The First Trade to discuss the latest election poll, 2020 outlook in America, how teams and brands are responding to the current civil unrest and more.

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(Bloomberg Opinion) — It doesn’t take much imagination to see the Federal Reserve supporting the stock price of Apple Inc.The central bank’s Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility recently released details about its “Broad Market Index,” which is a roadmap for which individual bonds it will buy for its portfolio after changing the rules to avoid forcing issuers to certify they’re in compliance with the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. Just looking at the 13 companies with weightings of at least 1%,(2)which collectively make up almost one-fifth of the index, a few things stand out. First, there are six automobile companies, with subsidiaries of Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp. and Germany’s Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG as the three largest issuers overall. In fourth is AT&T Inc., the largest nonfinancial borrower due in no small part to its $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner Inc. Then there’s Apple. As a reminder, it’s the largest U.S. company by market capitalization at $1.57 trillion, edging out Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. Its shares have easily rebounded from the selloff caused by the coronavirus pandemic, rallying 24% so far in 2020. Yes, Apple has about $100 billion of debt outstanding, but it’s also known for having one of the largest cash piles in the world. It’s so big, in fact, that the company could repay all its obligations and still have roughly $83 billion left over.With so much cash, that naturally raises the question: Why does Apple take on debt in the first place?In each of Apple’s past three dollar-bond sales, in November 2017, September 2019 and May, the company said it would use proceeds at least in part to repurchase common stock and pay dividends under its program to return capital to shareholders. In total, the company has doled out more than $200 billion since the start of 2018. It’s easy to see why company leadership would see it as too cheap not to borrow. Apple has the second-highest investment-grade credit ratings from Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings, allowing it to issue $2.5 billion of 30-year bonds in May that yielded just 2.72%. Its $2 billion of three-year debt, within the Fed’s maturity range, priced to yield less than 0.85%.Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer, said during the last quarter’s earnings call that the company has more than $90 billion in stock buyback authorization left, adding that it plans to continue the same capital allocation policy going forward.Obviously, cash is mostly fungible for large enterprises, and any number of American companies in recent years surely issued bonds for reasons other than buybacks and also repurchased shares. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimated some $700 billion of shares were acquired by U.S. companies in 2019, which would make them the biggest net buyer of equities.Still, Apple openly using debt sales to help finance share repurchases puts the Fed in a somewhat awkward position. Chair Jerome Powell has consistently framed questions about its secondary-market facility in the context of supporting the central bank’s full employment mandate. Workers are “the intended beneficiaries of all of our programs,” he said in a hearing last month. It’s possible Americans “are able to keep their jobs because companies can finance themselves.”And yet, the Fed’s secondary-market facility comes with no strings attached. In fact, as I noted last month, its maneuver to create Broad Market Index Bonds circumvented the CARES Act requirement that any company must have “significant operations in and a majority of its employees based in the United States.” Rather than focus on the American worker, the stated goal is to “support market liquidity for corporate debt,” and, by extension, keep borrowing costs down for creditworthy firms. So there’s every reason to expect that Apple can and will issue bonds again in the near future, at an even cheaper rate, to fund stock buybacks and dividends. That, in turn, would most likely support share prices.That shouldn’t sit well with many people. Even President Donald Trump, who has used the stock market as a barometer of his economic policies, has signaled a preference for capital projects over buybacks. On March 20, just before the S&P 500 Index fell to its lowest level of the Covid-19 selloff, he lamented that companies used the money saved from his 2017 tax cut to repurchase shares rather than build factories. He said at the time that he would support a prohibition on buybacks for companies that receive government aid.“When we did a big tax cut and when they took the money and did buybacks, that’s not building a hangar, that’s not buying aircraft, that’s not doing the kind of things that I want them to do,” Trump said. “We didn’t think we would have had to restrict it because we thought they would have known better. But they didn’t know better, in some cases.” The Fed’s strategy for buying corporate bonds is passive enough that few would equate it to receiving direct assistance from the federal government. The same can’t be said about the central bank’s Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility, which as of last week is open for business. Companies that want to place bonds directly with the Fed must certify that they have “not received specific support pursuant to the CARES Act or any subsequent federal legislation” and “satisfy the conflicts-of-interest requirements of section 4019 of the CARES Act.” As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Matt Levine described in detail last week, there’s a huge amount of paperwork for issuers, and the Fed has the right to demand its money back if the forms are wrong and companies use funds for unapproved reasons.In all likelihood, these constraints will turn almost every company away from the Fed’s primary-market facility. Instead, finance officers will reap the benefits of the central bank’s broad secondary-market interventions to issue new debt to private investors at rock-bottom rates and with no such rules, as they have for the past three months. And Wall Streeters will be happy with business-as-usual in the credit markets.To put it plainly one more time: The Fed didn’t have to loosely interpret the law to create this index of corporate debt. It was already following through on its pledge to buy exchange-traded funds and had a system in place for companies to become eligible for individual purchases. It chose this third route, encouraging headlines like  “Buying Corporate Bonds Is Almost Easy Money, Strategists Say.” What could go wrong?Now that it’s scooping up individual bonds issued for share buybacks without any stipulations, policy makers should be asked again why this program is the right way to go about supporting the recovery. The truth is likely that corporate America needs low-cost debt to survive. Apple and its shareholders are more than happy to tag along for the ride.(1) The Fed's facility has not yet purchased debt from all the companies in the index, at least according to its disclosure, which only covers the$429 million in bonds it bought on June 16 and 17. Its largest purchases were Comcast Corp., AbbVie Inc. and AT&T Inc.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Brian Chappatta is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering debt markets. He previously covered bonds for Bloomberg News. He is also a CFA charterholder.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Brook Dane, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, joins Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade to discuss the overall tech sector and more.

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