1. Their latest earnings continue to look good. I especially like the poke that this article takes at the activist-investor Daniel Loeb. He's still around? When is that guy going to take his ball and go home? Regardless, a profitable earnings reports is dull, but good.
2. The Dow chemists have been working hard and have developed a new plastic for Dow to sell. With as many chemists as Dow has, you would expect it to be some gee-whiz polymer with potentially mind-blowing chemistry and great potential to replace non-plastic materials with plastic. So what is it? An LLDPE (linear low-density polyethylene). LLDPE is actually a comonomer of ethylene and α-olefins. LLDPE's have been around for decades so this is hardly exciting or novel. But as the article notes, Dow's last major product introduction was in 2013 and was also olefin-based. What else would you expect when your former Chief Technology Officer goes on the record saying that "...[no] new polymers would be discovered, since chemists already had done a thorough job in finding ways to link carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulfur atoms."
This definitely is in the dull-and-bad category. Hopefully the current CTO has a better outlook on product development.
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