for Saturdays and Sundays, and even then there are capital markets working over in the Middle Eastern countries. I've always said that my job is to be the liberal arts major of the capital markets... I know a fairly good bit about the grain markets. I know a fairly good bit about what goes on in energy. I know a fairly good amount about how the Federal Reserve policy functions, how the foreign exchange market functions, and how the stock market functions. My job is to then look at how the energy market impinges upon grains, or how the grain market affects the foreign exchange market, or how the foreign exchange market affects the equities market to try to put together a cogent eight or nine pages every morning... "Here's what's happening, here's what's going on, and here's what you do with it." I've been very fortunate to have been able to do it every morning. I get up at 1:00 a.m. Eastern Time and try to knock out those pages every day. Sometimes there's a little humor in it and oftentimes I'm very wrong, but the important thing to do when you're wrong is to admit it. And I hope I have another 35 years of doing this, but as I approach 67 years old my bet is that I will be on the short side of that issue. Q: For me, the biggest conundrum right now is the oil markets. You knowway more about it than I ever will, but for me the question is: can the U.S. supply revolution really hold down the price of oil for long, or is the market telling us something is changing about the oil market permanently thanks to electric cars? Do you have a view?
DENNIS GARTMAN: We really are the revolutionaries in the world of oil: finding, drilling, and exporting. People don't realize how two major changes have been so important... Obviously, everybody talks about fracking, production of crude oil here in the United States. We've gone from 5 million barrels a day a mere 10 years ago to almost 10 million barrels a day now. Actually, I think it's 9.3, but we're going to be at 10 million barrels of production in the not-too-distant future. Also, we have to understand how much technology has increased using seismic technologies looking down into the ground to see what exists down there. Fifteen years ago when you drilled for crude oil, you sent a soda straw down into the ground, and maybe you had a 50% hit rate. Now we're at about 95% hit rates. And in the old days, we hoped that if we hit a 50% crude reservoir or natural gas reservoir, we thought it was relatively finitely shaped. But now we understand that it looks like the fingers of your hand, extending and protruding miles underground. And we've learned how to go down and see precisely how those formations exist... And instead of sending one soda straw straight down, we send one soda straw down into the ground and bend it five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times – moving out two, three, four, five miles. So we're drawing crude oil from areas that a mere five years ago were uneconomic, and are now clearly economic. What's more important to us is that we're and fracking has indeed changed the composition and the makeup and the
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