I’m round tripping back into BAS, because I can, for $17.20. Pretty much a lot of nothing – I sold at $17.29 on Friday.

This makes BAS a full position again (10%), along with CCJ (22%). Everything else is half sized. Cash stands at 45%.

I like what’s going on in natural gas prices. I’m not going to be left out of one of my best ideas when it runs.

Wow…I was about one day early here, clearly. Check out CCJ, check out HCLP, check out BAS. There’s just making money here. The only two positions I have that are down are physical silver and NRP.

CCJ is still a 20% position for me. Now it’s pressing through trying to cut the multi-year channel it’s been stuck in.

I’m up .9% today – fifty percent cash. That’s almost angry winning.

Come on guys – this is nuts. HCLP is up 5% on what? It’s been a great stock (I still have 5% of my book in it). But why is it up that much today?

We need a wash out. Because TW is not a 30X EPS stock, that’s why.

I just looked at Towers Watson (TW) stock. Look at that valuation, then look me in the eye and tell me this rally isn’t a bubble.

Do you even know what TW does? I do – because I used to be in the industry. It’s an actuarial firm; imagine all the employee compensation of a performance investment bank, but with none of the leverage or scalable business to ever make the big returns even possible, trading like a tech stock in the 90’s.

At least a third of Watson Wyatt and Towers Perrin (before they merged and consolidated) was – get this – pensions. As you can imagine, the fascinating and exciting business of fixed income securities is just a booming source of revenue growth nowadays…

Wait, no, sorry. Pensions is actually a hole that at these interest rates will eventually swallow whatever it touches. That’s what I meant to say.

I’m sure TW is getting some good business from the healthcare deal. Hell I know I am on the consultant side. But there is no way there’s enough growth taking place here to justify a 30 PE ratio. That’s insane.

Towers Watson employees are highly trained, high cost employees that expect massive bonuses when they contribute. The business is intellectual capital driven – outside of the minds of the employees, it’s just a bunch of Excel spreadsheets and some office equipment. The company can’t even take a position that could possibly result in a massive payoff like banks sometimes do; it’s a permanent fixture in consulting circles. Any big performance gets eaten up in employee performance compensation – $400,000 salaries come from somewhere.

You people are out of your minds. I will begin to ease into a larger cash position with the next low volume melt up. This ends in fire.

Hi-Crush Partners LP today announced they are raising the distribution 4%. This is in line with expectations and brings the yield to 5.7% from today’s price per share.

Considering it was just August that I was buying the partnership for $23.99, that puts my yield at an effective 8.5%. Quite pleasing for the moment – particularly when you stack the 48% unrealized gain on top of that.

The 9th floor is cloaked in excellence as we revel in 1.3% gains for the day. CCJ leads the charge, plus 3.21%, with loyal BAS and HCLP marching lockstep behind her, up 2.16% and 1.99% respectively. That’s 45% of my portfolio right there.

Everything else is being rather well behaved, and I’m making a good showing of the afternoon for it. Any give back from early January is now gone and I’m up 1% for the year.

This shall be the year of uranium. Cower before the terribleness of it all.

I usually am a little skeptical about the usefulness of guidance. Executive guidance can be some of the worst – people who are intimately wrapped up in a business tend to have a hard time knowing when to say “yeah, this ship is going down.” In fact, business school strictly forbids it.

But the most recent guidance from BAS, for whatever it’s worth, beat expectations. December was supposed to be a heinous month. Instead, it was merely a horrid month. Take that with a grain of salt.

Well rig service hours were unchanged, at about 61%. My long term thesis involves that number catapulting back to 80%+ eventually, which is why I own the name.

Fluid service truck count is up to 1,003 units. Fluid service truck hours are up 8% this year.

The company saw surprise strength in December (which is really just less flaccid weakness, pretending). Instead of the forecasted 7-8% drop in revenues that were expected, they anticipate they only saw a 6-7% drop.

This is all good and well and hearsay. What caught my eye was that they are also reporting their customers are reporting increases in 2014 spending. Now that’s useful to me.

The natural gas/well servicing industry was more or less crushed in 2011 thanks to generally bad dealings by one Aubrey McClendon. That and a half dozen other idiotic moves saddled CHK investors with 60% equity losses, taking the company to par with the lows set in 2009 (which is saying something).

This left most small well servicing firms in quite a predicament. You see, as a group they were pretty much a “no cash on hand” industry. There were only a few, like BAS, that had adequate financing to weather the storm.

A sea of mergers and acquisitions later (not to mention a few major bankruptcies; looking your way PSN.TO) and we may be ready to get back to fair weather. The natural gas spot price has largely recovered. And now BAS is reporting that client spending is looking up.