First Boston Quotations

With the market deficit slowly being filled by the big three producers at increasing unit capital cost - greenfield projects are likely to be much harder to justify, highlighting one motivation in the strategic advantage of bringing forward these expansions.

We believe confirmation of reporting financials is a positive step in improving visibility.

This is not as bad as it may look.

Most of (Chevron's) earnings miss was in the upstream and was caused by weak U.S. oil and gas volumes (hurricanes, declines) plus lower than expected U.S. gas realizations, as well as weak European gas volumes.

We would be surprised if the company could say anything to get the stock above $45, as most of the world is playing the stock on the long side and recent investor conferences have already incorporated a more bullish tone by the company.

These headline figures are ... misleading as most of the acceleration in PPI inflation during September was due to the one-shot cigarette price hike which went into effect at the beginning of the month.

Bottom line, it was hard to get excited as most of the demos focused on corporate or web/graphics oriented -- making this look more like demos from MacWorld last year, than consumer-oriented killer apps.

Investors will in our view naturally be concerned that the risk of referral has increased.