Amtrak vs. U.S. Freight Railroads: Infographic

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Amtrak is the only passenger major railroad operator in the U.S. Unlike railroads in other developed countries, Amtrak is chronically a mess and most people have never traveled in its trains except the other in the east and west coasts and some long distance routes. While US freight railroads are the most efficient and most profitable in the world, the story with Amtrak is not the same. While Amtrak’s potential is huge it is mostly useless for long distance travel since it does own much of the tracks. With that said, below is a neat infographic showing some of the differences between Amtrak and US freight railroads:

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Source: FreightWaves

Russian ADRs: Automatic Conversions Update

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BNY Mellon, the depository for many Russian DR programs has posted an update on the automatic conversion of Russian ADRs and GDRs to the ordinary shares trading on the local market. This update provides answers to some of the questions that owners of Russian ADRs may have. The automatic conversion starts from 8/31/22 to 9/6/22 and includes major ADRs like the oil giant Gazprom.

Below is an excerpt from the notice:

NOTICE TO HOLDERS OF AMERICAN AND GLOBAL DEPOSITARY SHARES REPRESENTING DEPOSITED SHARES OF RUSSIAN-INCORPORATED ISSUERS (“Russian DR Programs”)

Further to our notices of July 14, 2022 and August 1, 2022, BNY Mellon has been advised by its Russian custodian that Automatic Depositary receipt (“DR”) conversions for certain Russian DR Programs could begin as early as August 30, 2022.

The table in Annex I of this notice lists Russian DR Programs in-scope for Automatic DR conversions and the anticipated date that Automatic DR conversions may occur for each Russian DR Program.

Should BNY Mellon receive notification from its Russian custodian that shares underlying a specific Russian DR Program will be automatically removed from BNY Mellon’s account with its Russian custodian, BNY Mellon will immediately close the relevant Russian DR Program books for cancellation of DRs in accordance with the applicable Deposit Agreement and will not be able to process any corporate actions with respect to that Program (including voting) until a complete reconciliation of its books and records against DRs outstanding may be achieved.

Note that BNY Mellon cannot guarantee that such reconciliation will be possible, and, to the extent such reconciliation is not possible, the relevant Russian DR Program books will not be reopened.

As a reminder, under the mandatory provisions of the DR Delisting Law, BNY Mellon as Depositary will be disintermediated from DR cancellations using the Automatic DR Conversion procedures (described in detail in our notice of July 14, 2022).

Source: BNY Mellon

For more details please review the full notice at the above link.

The National Debt Mountain in Perspective: Infographic

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The Gross Federal Debt of the United States crossed $30.0 Trillion in February of this year. This mountain of debt is bound to grow as additional freebies are handed out by the Federal government including the recent student loan forgiveness program. For an average American anything more than a million is all numbers with lots of zeros. So billions and trillions simply mean some big number that nobody needs to worry about. The thinking goes whether the debt is $30 Trillion or $300 Trillion who cares.

The following infographic from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation puts the nation debt in perspective and how it impacts us all:

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Source: Peter G. Peterson Foundation

US Equity Bear Markets and Continuous Long-Term Growth: Chart

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Bear markets are often the best time to invest in equities. This is because bull markets follow bear markets always. Bear markets can be considered as the duration when excesses of the previous bull markets are washed off. The following is an awesome chart that shows the US bear market lengths and the overall rise in markets as referenced by the S&P 500 index value in green color on the right:

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Source: The Bear Market issue, Permanent Wealth Partners

For example, at the depth of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-2009 the S&P 500 reached 677 after a brutal bear market that prolonged for 17 months. Then by the time the next bear arrived in 2011 the index value was 1,099 or the next one in 2018 when the index was even higher at 2,351.

So the key takeaway for investors is not to focus too much on the bear market volatility and violent movements and instead focus on their long-term and invest consistently taking advantage of lower prices.

Related ETF:

  • SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY)

Disclosure: No Positions