Good morning all! An interesting batch of stories here to keep you in tune with the business chatter of the day. But a tidbit of trivia to start you off: Microsoft (Micro-Soft) was founded on April 4, 1975 as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell interpreters for the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, arguably the first personal computer. <\/p>\n
CAPACITY CRUNCH<\/strong><\/p>\n Natural gas producers and analysts want to solve a mystery: Who signed a century-long contract to ship gas<\/a> on TransCanada\u2019s pipeline system? As Geoffrey Morgan<\/a> writes, the typical contract period is about 25 years in an open-season bidding process, though this recent process averaged out at a whopping 107 years. As one observer noted, someone must have bought a far lengthier contract in order to pull the average down to 107. \u201cI just don\u2019t understand how you can run your business with a 100-year time horizon,\u201d another said.<\/p>\n ‘CAR BIZ IS HELL’<\/strong><\/p>\n Elon Musk says he is \u201cback to sleeping at the factory<\/a>\u201d while trying to fix production delays with the Model 3 electric car. He did the same with Tesla’s Model X \u2014 keeping a sleeping bag near the production line so he could immediately address any hiccups. Tesla\u2019s Q1 production numbers fell short of its forecasts: It built 2,020 Model 3 cars in the past seven days, well short of its target for 2,500 units. It delivered 8,180 of the sedans in the first three months of 2018, missing analysts\u2019 estimates for about 8,800 units. It\u2019s not clear where the current bottlenecks are, whether it’s with robots at Tesla\u2019s battery Gigafactory in Germany or with car assembly in California. But if the sleeping bag is in California …<\/p>\n SAME OLD STORY?<\/b><\/p>\n The bull market narrative has taken a dark turn<\/a>, but has anything really changed? Joe Chidley<\/a> takes a dive in to the reasons, such as the end of FANG’s rocket ride upward and Trump’s buzzkill on the revived growth of global economies. Chidley considers whether the world has really changed much in a month or whether this correction will eventually turn around like the five other ones (on the S&P 500) that have failed to stop this bull market.<\/p>\n