My Experience with Twitter Ads

It’s super horseshit.

One of my guys had scheduled tweets via the Twitter business account and Twitter took exception to it and offered us the ban hammer.

To mitigate this bullshit, I started to use my personal Twitter account to advertise on behalf of our corporate one. Pretty fucking stupid, huh?

A few days after I started to advertise, a rep contacted me to see how things were going. I told her that my corporate account had been banned from advertising and wanted to know how to get it lifted.

As you can see, I was quite courteous. After all, I thought it was retarded that I had to work around a ban on our corporate account, without cause.

Not only was Twitter useless to help me form campaigns– to take full advantage of the platform (I’ll get to that in a minute)– but they were unable to help me understand a major concern of mine, like being fucking BANNED. That’s what you call bad customer service.

So, without her help, I muddled away with a small campaign of $500, just to see what it could produce. First of all, finance is banned on Twitter. You must be thinking “naturally, why would Twitter want to permit people promoting their stock tips on their platform?” I agree. However, look at three of the ads that I placed that were reviewed and restricted, without explanation.

Why the fuck were those ads restricted?

After a few of my promotional tweets went out, immediately, I became concerned due to the level of engagement being too high. After inspection, I found that I was quite popular in Mongolia, Turkey, as well as several non-english speaking African nations.

I checked on the accounts that began to follow me and found they were bots, fake accounts with zero activity. I know Twitter claims to have 300 million people signed up. That’s complete and utter bullshit. I’d be surprised if they had 1/3rd of that.

Before placing filters on my campaign, I was acquiring followers for 10 fucking cents. That shit was cheap. After my filters, looking for finance folk, the cost skyrocketed to $2.50 per name. Who the fuck is going to pay $2.50 per follow?

All in all, the current structure and customer service of Twitter Ads is completely inept and without decorum. I do think there is potential, especially if they assigned reps to help me spend my money. I was more than willing to spend 5x the amount for this campaign, but became frustrated; and as a result, I throttled the budget.

We tried one last time to appeal to the @dick handlers at Twitter, to better try to understand why our good name was being banned from advertising on their glorious, fucktarded, platform.

This was their flippant response.

I am long TWTR. I sold the bulk near $30, but still own some for the long term. Get your shit together @Jack.

That’s it, VRX shorts. I have it under strong advisement that a certain Mr. William Albert Ackman has taken out his light sabre and is in the process of conducting a “thorough examination” into the whereabouts of the short sellers for “immediate disintergration.”

DO NOT KILL THE MESSENGER.

Although the market is a heaping pile of donkey shit, Mssrs W.A. Ackman has made it a point to “both punish and torture shorts of VRX in the style of the medieval.”

Again, NO HARM SHOULD BE ACCORDED TO THE MESSENGER.

Lastly, in the event you are short VRX and reading this message, I have a special directive for you.

Good Sir,

You’ve had your fun for the latter part of 2015, at the expense of W.A. Ackman. Now BEHOLD as he light sabres your face and cheeks about the street, ripping limbs from torso, torso from bone, bone from marrow. PREPARE TO MEET YOUR DECEASED RELATIVES IN THE AFTER-LIFE.

W.A.A.

What a wonderful rally. I hope it can last all the way until 4pm. Wouldn’t that be splendid?

Both airlines and oil stocks are up today, despite oil and gas balance sheets whithering away to nothing causing execs to cease handing out free soda pop in the break room.

On days like today, a long can only sit back and hope short sellers finally get mauled and slaughtered and mudstomped into gravel bits. They’ve had it good for too long.

On melt up days, the biggest piece of shit stocks tend to do well. Shares of GPRO, X, ATI, DGLY, BOFI, SN, MTL, CYBR and even BBRY are soaring, for Christ’s sake.

In the past, traders would get an erection seeing this type of risk appetite. However, for those of us who’ve been burned over the past two years, we’ve seen this homosexual horseshit play out too many times.

You get hoodwinked into buying into GPRO today; and by the time the trade settles, you’re balled up in the shower crying to baby jesus.

Look, fuck this market. Take profits fast. Don’t trust the man on the teevee. Remember that the Fed is going to clown-rape us next week.

A lot of people think buybacks are great for stocks. The truth is buybacks are nothing more than fuckery on behalf of the laziest slobs to ever walk the planet.

Imagine yourself to be a C-level exec at a large U.S. firm, like IBM. You have no idea how to scale or innovate; but you’re sitting on billions in cash.

You have a few options.

1. Vacate the golf course and try to invest the money to seek a return that will increase shareholder value.

2. Remain on the golf course and buy back shares, in order to increase earnings to trigger bonuses that will permit you to make 303x what everyone else at the company is making.

Share buybacks by U.S. non-financial companies reached a record $520 billion in the most recent reporting year. A Reuters analysis of 3,300 non-financial companies found that together, buybacks and dividends have surpassed total capital expenditures and are more than double research and development spending.

Companies buy back their shares for various reasons. They do it when they believe their shares are undervalued, or to make use of cash or cheap debt financing when business conditions don’t justify capital or R&D spending. They also do it to meet the expectations of increasingly demanding investors.

Lately, the sheer volume of buybacks has prompted complaints among academics, politicians and investors that massive stock repurchases are stifling innovation and hurting U.S. competitiveness – and contributing to widening income inequality by rewarding executives with ever higher pay, often divorced from a company’s underlying performance.

“There’s been an over-focus on buybacks and raising EPS to hit share option targets, and we know that those are concentrated in the hands of the few, and that the few is in the top 1 percent,” said James Montier, a member of the asset allocation team at global investment firm GMO in London, which manages more than $100 billion in assets.

The introduction of performance targets has been a driver of surging executive pay, helping to widen the gap between the richest in America and the rest of the country. Median CEO pay among companies in the S&P 500 increased to a record $10.3 million last year, up from $8.6 million in 2010, according to data firm Equilar.

At those levels, CEOs last year were paid 303 times what workers in their industries earned, compared with a ratio of 59 times in 1989, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit.

This is financial engineering at its worst. There’s a reason why people like Carl Icahn and Nelson Pelz have made a magnificent living by pressing the faces of CEOs onto panini presses. American CEOs, more or less, are decadent sloths, galivanting about acres of greenery, living like Caesars, ordering mid-level clerks to initiate share buybacks to ingratiate themselves to no end.

The iron and steel sector is down 65% for the year. The Chinese, apparently, have ceased building ghost cities, gambling, eating, and also shopping. They do, however, still actively partake in accounting fraud and wanton pollution.

The iron sector embodies the hidden depression that has ravaged markets over the past two years. I’ve seen many of my friends check out of the business these past two years, after decades of service. The market is the great fortune creator and destroyer, depending on what side of the trade you’re on.

STLD, CRS, AKS are interesting, especially CRS.

A few years back CRS built a revolutionary plant that was designed to slash expenses and help them kill it. In other words, their expenses are likely a fraction of their competitors, which is why the share price is still in the $30’s.

As for the longevity of this rally: No idea. I am, however, wholly unimpressed.

This is actually a really good company, who sells software without a salesteam. They bootstrapped from a $10k credit card loan to a valuation that exceeds $3 billion, scaling via the web.

The company does about $319 million in revenues, is profitable, and super efficient.

This is truly an amazing success story, but I’m sure Wall Street will get carried away and make a mockery of itself with an absurd opening for TEAM today.

There is a certain level of seriousness oddly absent from the white house.

It looks like the President and his wife very much enjoy the splendour of the oval office.

Sandridge, as well as many other US oil producers, are what industry insiders call ‘zombie companies.’ They’re completely broke, unable to fund operations, only able to pay off the interest on debt.

Well, things are SD have gotten so real, the company has rescinded a former luxury bestowed upon its employees: free soda pop in the break room.

Squeezed, companies are taking a knife to operations. Goodrich reported in its third-quarter filing that it had frozen salaries and laid off 30 percent of its workers.

To raise cash, SandRidge put its 30-story tower up for sale in May, but has yet to find a buyer. In April, it laid off at least 130 employees, or 20 percent of its workers based there, records show.

To pinch pennies, SandRidge has eliminated free sodas from break rooms, one employee said.

Some companies that have halted nearly all drilling and fracking are now warning in regulatory filings their output could drop, which could make cash even tighter and hasten an expected decline in U.S. crude output.

Shares of SD have been reduced to drill bits this year, down to .25 cents.

Everyone’s favorite ice cube marinator sums up 2015.

This is actual Armageddon of the fracking industry. I am not exaggerating when I say CHK is destined for a pineapple coffin, sooner rather than later.

The accounting rules that were manipulated by a certain AUBREY McCLENDON are about to boomarang onto the faces of the gluttonous fracking industry, like a motherfucker in a factory filled with nothing but mothers.

Across the American shale patch, companies are being forced to square their reported oil reserves with hard economic reality. After lobbying for rules that let them claim their vast underground potential at the start of the boom, they must now acknowledge what their investors already know: many prospective wells would lose money with oil hovering below $40 a barrel.

Companies such as Chesapeake, founded by fracking pioneer Aubrey McClendon, pushed the Securities and Exchange Commission for an accounting change in 2009 that made it easier to claim reserves from wells that wouldn’t be drilled for years. Inventories almost doubled and investors poured money into the shale boom, enticed by near-bottomless prospects.

But the rule has a catch. It requires that the undrilled wells be profitable at a price determined by an SEC formula, and they must be drilled within five years.

Time is up, prices are down, and the rule is about to wipe out billions of barrels of shale drillers’ reserves. The reckoning is coming in the next few months, when the companies report 2015 figures.

“There was too much optimism built into their forecasts,” said David Hughes, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and formerly a scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada. “It was a great game while it lasted.”

The rule change will cut Chesapeake’s inventory by 45 percent, regulatory filings show. Chesapeake’s additional discoveries and expansions will offset some of its revisions, the company said in a third-quarter regulatory filing. Gordon Pennoyer, a spokesman for Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake, declined to comment further.

Other examples include Denver-based Bill Barrett Corp., which will lose as much as 40 percent, and Oasis Petroleum Inc., based in Houston, which will erase 33 percent, according to filings. Larry Busnardo, a Bill Barrett spokesman, declined to comment. Richard Robuck of Oasis didn’t respond to questions.

Drillers met the rule’s profitability provision last year due to a quirk in the SEC’s pricing formula. The agency’s yardstick is an average of the prices on the first day of each month during the calendar year. The price came to $95 a barrel at the end of 2014, even though oil was trading below $50 by the time the companies reported reserves in February and March. The 2015 average, including the Dec. 1 price, comes out to $51 a barrel.

“They got such a break with the price for last year, but it sure as hell isn’t going to happen this year,” said Ed Hirs, a managing director at Houston-based Hillhouse Resources, an independent energy company.

Writedowns, which are reported on a quarterly basis, point to sizable revisions. The 61 companies in the Bloomberg North American Independent Explorers and Producers index have announced impairments of $143.8 billion in the past year.

 

This is the end game that the House of  Saud have been clamoring for, the complete and utter dissolution of the American oil and gas space. From hereonforth, American leaders will have to bow down and klss the scepter of our Saudi King. Our claims of energy independence were laughably homosexual in the face of cock shrinking declines. Producers puffed out their fat stomachs and walked around Houston with ridiculous hats, with production costs of $80 per barrel. Now that oil is $38ish, those same men are in the streets completely naked, and eating food out from the corner trash can.

The write downs are coming. There will be blood.