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Strategies & Market Trends : Mr. Pink's Picks: selected event-driven value investments -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mad2 who wrote (16776)	7/28/2002 3:44:40 PM
From: MAELING	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18998

Great questions: 1. EP seems off the hook for electricity. I thought that the Federal Judge let them off the hook last fall for rigging natural gas prices. However, I'm not totally sure now. Problem in California is Enron. If the Atty General can prove fraud by ENE, this may be the lever needed to void all the contracts. On the other hand, WMB announced some sort of settlement friday, but CA refused to confirm. ??? In any case, it's instructive that CA has had a stage 2 alert this summer. Which corroborates all the studies showing that the state lacks ~10,000 MW of generative capacity. 2. I don't think that EP's problem is round trips. 3. This is a very real issue. On the other hand, if lots of the merchants enter Ch 11, EP could do OK. viz, PG&E got current in BK, while SoCal Edison still is behind on some of their QF payments. 4. During the power crisis, Nat Gas storage in CA was at a low. Now it's very high. That'll happen in a recession. As a general assumption all new plants in CA are gas-fired. Pipes become an issue. In electricity, pipes are an issue as well. The NS problem with Reach 15 is being addressed, but the operational word is 'being'. In SoCal there are no current plans to add to the Palo Verde line. Happy to share information. The operational word is 'share'. I don't care to offer hard-won stuff to ditto-heads who echo lightweight analyst stuff. - I mean like: didn't the analysts read the 10K and 10Q? They've been out for months. I'm assuming that S+P and Moodys ask harder questions 9 months post Enron. (And if you compare the two companies' 10K's, there's no comparison.) ie, I'm willing to discount ALL the analysts. Thestreet.com ranks with CNBC, Jerry Springer, and Oprah. Thanks for the response.