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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sergio H who wrote (46152)	1/12/2012 4:12:23 AM
From: Ditchdigger	Respond to of 78704

Thanks Sergio, I missed EKS's earlier mention of DOW(kudo's eks). Did you realize the price of ethane was at .96/gal in mid Oct and if I'm not mistaken is now nearing .65/gal. bloomberg.com Interesting quote "Producers in the U.S. of ethylene, a plastics ingredient, are benefiting from lower prices for natural gas, which is used as a raw material and to power factories. Ethane, a natural-gas liquid that’s converted to ethylene, fell 5 cents to 68.5 cents a gallon at Mont Belvieu, Texas, the biggest drop since Aug. 8 and the lowest prices since March 15, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A drop of 1 cent per gallon in the price of ethane boosts earnings by 2 cents a share at Rotterdam-based LyondellBasell and Midland, Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co. (DOW) and by 9 cents at Houston-based Westlake, Hassan Ahmed, an analyst at Alembic Global Advisors in New York said in a note yesterday." (that break through 31/sh could be a pivotal point for DOW-overall markets willing) and with regards to competing feedstock naptha " Ethylene plants, known as crackers, are running at 70 percent to 72 percent of capacity in Europe, where the use of naphtha as a raw material is leading to a small loss to break- even, the CFO said. The low operating rates have removed about 6,000 metric tons of ethylene from global supply, he said. The plants can’t run any slower without being shut, he said. "