Poland Rejects EU Migrant Quotas

I wonder why all of these lads don’t go the other direction to Saudi Arabia, or UAE? They have lots of money and also practice the same religion.

Poland’s new government won’t accept migrant quotas imposed by the European Union, as the terror attacks in France have exposed the weakness in the bloc, the nation’s future minister for European affairs said.

“In the wake of the tragic events in Paris, Poland doesn’t see the political possibilities to implement a decision on the relocation of refugees,” Konrad Szymanski was quoted as saying on Wpolityce.pl website on Saturday. “The attacks mean there’s a need for an even deeper revision of the European policy regarding the migrant crisis.”

Another option, of course, is for them to swing a right and head on over to Mother Russia. Vlad Putin is waiting with open arms and a big cold bowl of disgusting borscht for all new migrants.

I was going to review a French film, having seen a few, in solidarity with the French people. But then I changed my mind about discussing some sappy, sad, movie and opted for one that better fit my mood.

Mission Impossible–Rogue Nation was a terrific action film. This is what a James Bond film should look like, with amazing stunts, fantastic dialogue, and great plot twists. Trust me, watch this movie; you will not be disappointed.

This is probably the best action movie, for me, since Batman Dark Knight Rises, which is one of my favorites of all time.

French President said all of the terrorists who were holed up in the concert hall are dead.

4 gunmen have been killed, 1 arrested.

1,500 soldiers in French streets, patrolling.

Online chatter on ISIS websites are saying Rome, London and DC are next.

French President Hollande said at the Bataclan tonight: “We are going to lead a war, it will be pitiless” against the terrorists.

Via Guardian:

UPDATE: 5 terrorists are dead, according to Fox News.

UPDATE: Nasdaq futs -0.9%

UPDATE: French President’s full speech, transcribed.

“My dear compatriots,

As I speak, terrorist attacks of unprecedented proportions are underway in the Paris area. There are dozens killed, there are many injured. It is a horror.

We have, on my decision, mobilized all forces possible to neutralize the terrorists and make all concerned areas safe. I have also asked for military reinforcements.

They are currently in the Paris area, to ensure that no new attack can take place. I have also called a cabinet meeting that will be held in a few minutes.

Two decisions will be taken: A state of emergency will be declared, which means that some places will be closed, traffic may be banned, and there will also be searches which may be decided throughout Ile de France (greater Paris). The state of emergency will be proclaimed throughout the territory (of France).

The second decision I have made is to close the borders. We must ensure that no one enters to commit any crimes and that those who have committed the crimes that we have unfortunately seen can also be arrested if they should leave the territory.

This is a terrible ordeal which once again assails us. We know where it comes from, who these criminals are, who these terrorists are.

In these difficult moments, we must — and I’m thinking of the many victims, their families and the injured — show compassion and solidarity. But we must also show unity and calm.

Faced with terror, France must be strong, it must be great and the state authorities must be firm. We will be.

We must also call on everyone to be responsible.

What the terrorists want is to scare us and fill us with dread. There is indeed reason to be afraid. There is dread, but in the face of this dread, there is a nation that knows how to defend itself, that knows how to mobilise its forces and, once again, will defeat the terrorists.

French citizens, we have not completed the operations. There are still some that are extremely difficult. It’s at this moment that the security forces are staging an assault, especially in a place in Paris.

I ask you to keep all your trust in what we can do with the security forces to protect our nation from terrorist acts.

Long live the Republic and long live France.”

UPDATE: 8 attackers dead, including 7 suicide vests.

Gunfire and bombs are being reported in a Parisian theatre, leaving more than 60 dead. This is an ongoing crisis with French police positioning to breach the theatre, who reportedly, have hostages and are indiscriminately killing people.

Reports of attacks in at least 3 separate places are being reported, as well as hostage taking. The French President has declared a state of emergency and has closed France’s borders to all surrounding countries.

UPDATE: Witnesses are saying gunmen entered building with AK-47s and went on a wild shooting spree, killing anyone in sight. There’s also reports that over 150 hostages have been freed. Upwards of 28 are still trapped.  Police are storming thr building.

UPDATE: France’s President was at the soccer game and was safely evacuated.

UPDATE: Fox is reporting French authorities have confirmed this is an ISIS attack. For the first time since 1944, France has declared curfew.

UPDATE: France says the attack is over. They’ve secured the area.

UPDATE: I found this video on youtube

UPDATE: Reports of ‘jungle’ refugee camp in Calais on fire. Refugees attempting to flee.

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Let’s be perfectly clear about what’s taking place here. There have been 100’s of thousansds of refugees streaming in from war stricken Syria, destined for Europe. The do-gooders screamed at the top of their lungs to help these people, naively thinking every single one was a starving child.

I suppose the Europeans forgot the old tale of the trojan horse. Today’s attack is a direct result of liberal immigration policies that have resulted in scores of dead French citizens.

CNN is speculating this is an ISIS attack, who were likely smuggled in through the refugee swarms.

The market got absolutely poleaxed this weak, led lower by crude and retail stocks. There is a very tangible concern about this holiday season, after seeing numbers out of Macy’s and Nordstrom. Home furnishing stores also took to the bottle, with big ass losses in BBBY, KIRK and PIR.

Both GME and HGG led electronic stores lower. And there were about a dozen or so retail stores with shares down in the double digits.

Oil and gas was a sideshow, but also lower–as crude threatens to trade with a 3 handle. It’s clear to me, as well as many others, that the Fed is causing a problem with markets. Their incessant obsession to begin a series of rate hikes has people running away from anything that isn’t MSFT and FB.

The only sector, out of 200+ inside Exodus, that was higher this week was brewers–because people are getting drunk as fuck.

Europe is being invaded by zombie hordes of savage middle easterners. America is overrun with bad burritos from CMG. And Asia is a giant spiraling toilet bowl waiting to be flushed.

These are hardly times for us to be celebrating the revival of American exceptionalism, something the Fed seems to be doing.

For the week, I shed an enormous amount of gains. Every down day was worse than the previous one.  The Option Addict has been seeing the market with clear eyes and is giving a 5 day mini boot camp to rehash recent events and provide the content that was given during the iBC conference. For those of you who were unable to make it out to NYC this year, make sure you sign up for our online version, which begins next week.

My only point of hope for today is in my PAH position, one that has been sold and sold again, like a fucking whore in the south of Bronx. It looks like Bill Ackman caught his footing in VRX today. As such, his other positions are responding in kind.

Is that where we are now in this market, watching, tick by tick, the stocks of billionaire hedge fund managers to determine whether or not they will make it?

How many points are we down this week? Seeing markets dive like this makes you second guess yourself about the reasons why you became a trader or a money manager in the first place.  Boundaries aren’t being respected and the Fed isn’t putting up a bid for this market anymore. Instead, those fuckers have offers out.

I hate Friday’s in bear markets; they’re always the worst. Back in 2001-2003, I hated going to work, period. Those markets were similar to this, trends shattered inside of two days. If the market did rally, it was done in a very narrow fashion. It got so bad, I had to give up trading NASDAQS and had to rebuild my business around fixed income.

It wasn’t until we saw some real tax cuts and economic stimulus than did we see markets go higher again.

2003 was an epic year for me. It was the rebirth of Le Fly, career wise. At first, my gains were deliberate and moderated. Then I got the gist of it, sort of like riding a bike, and I was off to the races, throwing up huge numbers at my firm–once again.

Bull markets make you do stupid things, just like how I traded stupidly last year, so heavily concentrated in expensive tech into a bad decline. We all have muscle memory for upward surging stocks, thanks to years of unabated gains.

But we’re closing in on two years of rough sledding and I think it’s fair to say the bull market we grew to enjoy from 2009-2014 is over. It has been over for nearly two years.

The markets have been in free fall mode since the last jobs report. Each and every day, the Fed send a talking head out to make speeches about the virtues of rate hikes. The last time the Fed and Europe were going opposite directions with rates was 1994.

To be clear, the Fed believes the world is in a good place. Perhaps they’re not paying attention to the $628 billion in bad Chinese bank debt, or the deepening recession in Latin America, or the weaker than expected German manufacturing output.

Maybe, instead of looking at the jobs numbers, they should looks at oil, copper, steel, aluminum, and try to extrapolate how the the U.S. might look after 100’s of billions of dollars in petrol debt goes bad, sending oil men to the unemployment line by the thousands.

I think the Fed would be wise to examine the retail landscape and see WMT’s and M’s last quarterly reports. They might even want to take a look at JWN’s today, just to get an idea how the well to do are doing.

The Federal Reserve governors and their chief, Janet Yellen, are living in a fairy tale world with pixie dust covering butterscotched candies, clubbed sandwich lunches, impromptu pediatrist appointments and pearl brooches. They’re all delusional or worse: they might be purposly driving the U.S. economy into the sewers.

Here is a brief summary of recent Fed head comments:

Fed’s Lacker says monetary policy impact on real economy has been limited; inflation figures are not implying a departure from Fed targets.

“We can’t wait until we see the whites of inflation’s eyes; if we did, we would overshoot the mark,” Williams said. “An earlier start to raising rates would also allow a smoother, more gradual process of policy normalization, giving us space to fine-tune our responses to any surprise changes in economic conditions.”

Fed’s Rosengren says it could be appropriate to raise rates in December; has seen real improvement in the economy since October meeting

Fed’s Bullard says rise in dollar has already been priced in; global fears that caused the Fed to delay have largely dissipated; probability of a Dec hike at 80

The U.S. economy is overcoming the “sizable shock” from the dollar’s appreciation and foreign weakness, said Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer, on Thursday. “The U.S. economy appears to be weathering them reasonably well,” Fischer said in a speech to a conference on rate policy hosted by the U.S. central bank. The dollar has appreciated by 15% since July 2014, and it will remain a drag on gross domestic product well into next year, Fischer said.

All future committee meetings — including December’s — could be an appropriate time for raising rates, as long as the economy continues to improve as expected,” Rosengren told an audience Monday in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

Fed’s Mester says U.S. economy can handle a rate increase; sees strong case for lift off

In New York, William Dudley said: “I see the risks right now of moving too quickly versus moving too slowly as nearly balanced.”

But New York Fed President William Dudley said that “it is quite possible that the conditions the committee has established to begin to normalize monetary policy could soon be satisfied.”

“While the dollar’s appreciation and foreign weakness have been a sizable shock, the U.S. economy appears to be weathering them reasonably well,” Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Stanely Fischer said.

“The committee has been very clear that the normalization path here is going to be shallower,” than the steady quarter-point-per-meeting hikes used by the Fed early this century or the faster hikes enacted in the early 1990s, said James Bullard, St. Louis Fed President.

These fuckers should be taken to the gibbet, in the city square, and beaten unconscious with a cat o’ nine tails.

I could not have been more wrong about my SHAK diagnosis. After the earnings beat, considering 64% of the shares were sold short, I felt the stock was fixing to go on a gorilla run higher.

Wrong.

I misjudged the risk appetite, again. Truth is, SHAK is still trading 10x sales and the landscape for the restaurant industry is 100% shit, sans MCD. Who could’ve predicted that?

I am sure some cynics did.

So now the question that begs to be answered: where do we go from here?

Considering the stock is down almost 15 points since they last reported GREAT earnings a week ago (FML), I’d say this fucked face stock is bound to bounce off the concrete. The prognosis now is very dire, seeing the shares knife lower on a daily basis, despite a bright future in clogging the arteries of hipsters everywhere.

If it were to come in line with its peer group, on a p/s basis, the stock would trade down to $25. It’s also worth noting, the company is subject to fucked up Fitbit styled secondaries from insiders.

This market has become a dumping ground, a fucking junkyard, for VCs and founders to get rich quick–fueled by out of control private valuations and a complicit investment banking conduit to a naive public.

The two main VC funds, as well as several insiders, including the CEO, are now sitting on billions in profits and are seemingly racing towards the exits.

Truth be told, I don’t blame them. FIT is a steaming pile of shit, who will eventually get destroyed by Apple. News came out this morning about the offering and I found it rather amusing, in a clown shot out from a carnivale cannon sort of way.

In the sale, Fitbit will offer 3 million shares instead of the 7 million it previously planned, according to a filing Friday. The number of shares sold by existing stockholders remains unchanged at 14 million. The price, $29, is 8.5 percent lower than the $31.68 close. The shares fell 6.2 percent to $29.71 at 7:21 a.m. in New York before the markets opened.

Let’s recap. The company itself, in good faith to the existing shareholders, reduced their part of the offering from 7 million shares to 3 million. However, their own CEO and the VCs said “fuck that” and kept their offering at 14 million shares and had the investment bankers price it deep in the hole in order to attract bag holders.

What a nice CEO.

For a broker, this is an easy sale. Clients will gladly take a secondary priced at an 8.5% discount to market, thinking they’ll flip it for a quick win. Brokers are fucking assholes and will buy anything with a sales concession affixed to it.

So there you have it. FIT shareholders fucked again, courtesy of you beloved venture capitalists.

FIT is cratering at the open, down 8%.

So I’m looking over the retail lanscape, trying to find rhyme or reason. I went into this with a bearish bias, seeing JWN and FOSL getting smoked into pig pits this morning. However, I left this study, fully convinced, this is a world fit for a lunatic and only one company is winning.

Here is the YTD performance of many of the top retailers.

Try to find a trend to this randomness. JWN was winning before today’s poleaxing. Macy’s was a great stock last year. Oh, and JCP is up 35% this year. I didn’t bother putting them on the list, however. No room.

As for the sole winner. AMZN is up 114% this year.