Redstone Isn’t Senile; Money Grubbers Descend

I once had a dear client who got old, a little incapacitated, and then his children descended upon his estate like fucking vultures. It was a disgusting display of greed. The thing about my client, a man of honor and business in his community, is that he never cared about money. He lived in a small house near his factory, while his bratty kids lived in the McMansions by the golf course. I guess I admire that quality from afar, since I’m guilty of a 6 bedroom dwelling and multiple foreign cars, some might consider luxury.

Nevertheless, when I get old and insane(r), I promise you that my funds will be tucked away in my foundation of the production and facilitation of Orbital Space Cannons (OSC), designed for offensive purposes only.

Enter Sumner Redstone, boss at CBS.

California Superior Court Judge Clifford Klein on Monday said that he didn’t think the case was urgent simply because Redstone is 92 years old. Klein said the request by Pierce O’Donnell, a lawyer for Manuela Herzer, to take a videotaped deposition of Redstone was premature until the case has survived the request to dismiss it.

Redstone, the Viacom Inc. founder and chairman who controls that company and CBS Corp., kicked Herzer out of his Beverly Hills home last month and removed her as his decision maker on his advance health care directive should he become unable to make his own decisions. Herzer sued him last week seeking a court ruling that Redstone is mentally incapacitated and reinstating her as his proxy.

“We are pleased the court today expressly rejected Ms. Herzer’s claims of
urgency and granted our request to stay discovery pending next year’s hearing
on our motion to dismiss,” Gabrielle Vidal, Redstone’s lawyer, said in a statement after the hearing in Los Angeles.
Klein tentatively scheduled a hearing for Jan. 27 on Redstone’s request to dismiss the case.

Redstone argues Herzer’s suit should be tossed based on a provision of California probate law that says the petition can be thrown out if it isn’t reasonably needed to protect the patient.

Petition ‘Farce’
Redstone’s lawyers said in a court filing that Herzer’s petition is a “farce” and that she’s merely concerned about being removed from his will.
Herzer, who’s been Redstone’s friend for almost 20 years and says she was told to leave his home on Oct. 12 without being allowed to talk to him, claims he had been manipulated to turn against her, according to court filings.

Just in time for the holiday season, yes? My knee jerk reaction was “oh this girlfriend is just trying to muscle her way into his billions.” But she’s been dealing with his shit for 20 years. Then I got to thinking “it must be his fucking ridiculous children, who were raised like champagne cavemen who had designs on his fortune.”

Either way, whether someone is out for old Redstone’s dough or not, I find it to be all too common, and reprehensible, that family members treat their patriarchs and matriarchs like departing money bags, each and all jumping in the air for a few million to keep the dream and hope of wanton “success” and luxurious living alive.

How about you fuckheads go out and make your own money?

All of these allegions running wild about the veracity of VRX’s business model has me voraciously acquiring its shares.

My name isn’t Bill Albert Ackman and I’ve never tried to turn around piece of shit retailer JCP; but I am long VRX here, looking to crucify shorts who find themselves squeezed here.

Biotechs were pummeled into dust; but VRX surged ahead.

I even got into a little “back and forth” with the lad who liked to attack VRX on his blospot address.

This is how it’s going down. Stocks will trade flat, but Bill Ackman and a consortium of like minded friends will push the envelope on VRX–burning all of the short sellers alive, actually killing them. By the time pagan X-mas is here, I will be popping corks of champagne into the tweets of that blogspot gent, while laughing and screaming, all the way to the bank.

Good news for all of you corn lovers out there. Monsanto has been doing such a good job at managing our food supply, they decided to up the mandate on biofuels in the gas mix–screwing the refiners, but ingratiating the alternative energy plays.

Here is the alt energy index in Exodus

I don’t know what to think of this shit, frankly. When corn was super expensive, I used to shit on the EPA for their “crazy liberal ways”, burning food and all. But now food is plentiful and cheap, despite what my WFM bill says. So, maybe this is a good thing: burn up the fucking corn and give another industry a shot at success.

To play this, long term, maybe GPRE works, with PEIX as a dice roll gamble. You’d have to be super drunk and fatalistic to invest in this sector. Then again, look at VRX and how I am making the money in it (extra russian accent, soviet era).

As for corn, I’ll leave that to you chart chomping catamites.

Frederick Wilson will not be pleased by this blog, highlighting a horrific ipo market, the worst since 2009.

For the year, our beloved underwriters have raised just $30 billion for companies coming public, down 64% from 2014. That’s a clown number. All of the men, in all of the investment banking divisions, should be fired and replaced with fire hydrants.

On top of that, 1/3rd of all 2015 IPOs were dogshit biotechs. This has truly been a year of extreme fuckery; and we’re not done yet.

Part of the problem is the lack of necessity to IPO. Fred Wilson has plenty of money to dole out to companies. He pays them to burn cash in a giant garbage pale. In return, they all walk around with hoodies and hire a bunch of cool people to help burn Fred’s money. Then Fred shows his friends how awesome they are and then sells his shares to them, booking 100,000% profits.

By the time the buyers figure out the company they invested in was nothing more than a money burning in garbage pale operation, it’s too late; the shares would have alredy dropped by 80%.

I’m long two William A. Ackman stocks, and rooting for his diabolical revenge plot to unfold.

Shares of VRX are steamrolling higher today, inspite of a bad market.

The other stock is PAH. But in order for Mr. Ackman, as he’s properly referred to at his manor, shares of VRX must surge so fast, so highly, it will initiste heart attacks in the persons involved in the whole short selling, smear, campaign.

As an aside, shares of SHAK are barreling higher too, making today an all important day for yours truly. It’s especially good when seeing the lot of you strewn out across the lawn, getting mowed down by the blades of your stocks.

As a double aside, Jeff Macke will be joining our ranks soon, video blogging about retail and how fucked it is now.

DEVELOPING…

This is my least enjoyable year in more than a decade trading. Despite being up 15 some odd percent, I hated 2015, even more than my big drawdown year of 2014.

For more than 6 month’s, I’ve labored in this market, dodging bullets and absorbing knife wounds to the stomach, all for nothing. I made all of my gains before May, and then have watched the market morph into a FANG fest, where only a handful of stocks went higher and where my holdings never seem to get a break.

Granted, I am grateful for not getting David Einhorn’d this year and life could be worse; but it’s not fun managing money right now.

I’ll tell you what is fun: advertising on Twitter can becoming a phenom in places like Mongolia and Turkey.

For the first time ever, iBankCoin is beginning to advertise on both Facebook and Twitter, just to expand our tentacles. Thus far, our FB experience was no different from tossing bags of money into flaming barrels of garbage. Twitter, on the othe hand, netted tanglible results, but were skewed by the fact that foreign bot accounts plague the ecosystem.

Before I screened my target audience, dumb shits from all over the globe started to follow me, in response to my ad campaign.

Here I am rambling about some shit that 99.5% of you couldn’t care less about. Geez.

Rule #1 when blogging: talk about what the people want to hear, not what you want to write about.

With that in mind, FCX popped out of nowhere, as did my PAH position. This is the time of year, when volume thins out, big hedge funds push stocks around, in an effort to salvage their pathetic year’s and ingratiate themselves with monstrous sized paychecks.

God bless America.

Apparently, Shkreli livestreams his entire life. I’m not particularly sure how many other biotech CEOs partake in such depravities, such as demonstrating World of Warcraft skills or hoverboarding about the office; but Martin thinks it’s a good idea.

Last night the discussion on his livestream Youtube channel delved into stocks, as he took requests from viewers.

Someone mentioned WGBS and Martin had this to say.

“Could be an ok investment…Definitely not bad.. Definitely not bad… Yeah I wonder if this WaferGen is not so bad.”

On that news, this $12 mill market cap piece of offal is higher by 26% this morning, on nearly 4 million shares.

I guarantee this ends badly, 100%.

The sages over at StockTwits are all over this.

Are you all this stupid, or simply feigning to be idiots?

Bad news for you Fang bangers out there, those long FB, AAPL, NFLX and GOOG: Jefferies sees breadth expanding and doesn’t see a reason to remain secluded in just 4 stinking stocks. They believe, unlike Morgan Stanley, stocks might just rally, beyond a handful of names.

Year-to-date, Facebook is up 35 percent, Amazon 116 percent, Netflix 157 percent, and Google’s Alphabet has jumped 43 percent. This means that the FANG group has been carrying the S&P 500 for much of the year, with the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index, which strips out the effect of large market capitalizations, in negative territory for the year.

A rather important question for investors looking ahead to 2016 is thus whether or not the run in all-powerful FANG stocks will continue. Analysts over at Jefferies are skeptical.

Chief Global Equity Strategist Sean Darby and his team figure there are three extra questions that can help explain the FANG group’s recent upwards moves and answer the question of whether or not the stunning run will continue into next year.
First, how much of this surge is simply due to investors avoiding other areas of the market?

“With the S&P likely to experience a negative earnings year in 2015, there has been a fund shift to ‘growth’ through the year, just as there has been a shift out of the U.S. into other markets,” Darby says. The returns in the S&P 500 since May might be partially explain by this point. As Dana Lyons, partner at J. Lyons Fund Management put it in a blog post late last week; “The median U.S. stock … hit its high for the year in May and is actually down nearly 7 percent [as of Nov. 25].” Since May, all of the FANG stocks are up at least 30 percent.

The research note went on to explain how inflation had bottomed and how chocolate covered rainbows are not only good for you, but tasty too.

I have no real input on this matter. One firm thinks stocks suck and will continue to suck. These maniacs think FANG is old hat and new hats are about to emerge. It’s all horseshit, if you ask me.

This is a traders market.

The good times are over, apparently. Asset managers and self directed investors should prep themselves for the eventuality of moribund returns, according to Morgan Stanley.

A period of unprecedented monetary stimulus in the wake of the global financial crisis helped spur “an unusually benign” trade-off between the risk a portfolio manager is willing to take and excess returns generated.

That is, returns have been higher for a given level of volatility than the previous 20-year average. What’s more, notes Sheets, is that the slope of the 2010-2015 frontier shows that adding more volatile holdings (like stocks) was a better risk-reward proposition than the period from 1990 to 2009.

But Morgan Stanley’s forecasts for returns across asset classes suggest this is all about to change. Investors should prepare for an era of below-average returns, in which moving into riskier holdings won’t juice performance as much as it has in the recent past. On either side of the Atlantic, the 10-year return from a portfolio equally divided between stocks and bonds is not expected to break 4 percent.

After the Morgan Stanley analyst, who wrote this gibberish, finished this report, he, reportedly, soiled himself and then went to polish off his crystal ball.

Unbelievable clownery taking place in Tokyo these days. Last October the Samurai at GPIF decided to double its equity exposure to over 20% of assets, divesting from old boring bonds in the process. Everything was swell, until markets pounded them into dust and absconded with $64 billion of Japanese savings.

The world’s biggest pension fund posted its worst quarterly loss since at least 2008 after a global stock rout in August and September wiped $64 billion off the Japanese asset manager’s investments.

The 135.1 trillion yen ($1.1 trillion) Government Pension Investment Fund lost 5.6 percent last quarter as the value of its holdings declined by 7.9 trillion yen, according to documents released Monday in Tokyo. That’s the biggest percentage drop in comparable data starting from April 2008. The fund lost 8 trillion yen on its domestic and foreign equities and 241 billion yen on overseas debt, while Japanese bonds handed GPIF a 302 billion yen gain.

The loss was GPIF’s first since doubling its allocation to stocks and reducing debt last October, and highlights the risk of sharp short-term losses that come with the fund’s more aggressive investment style. Fund executives have argued that holding more shares and foreign assets is a better approach as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to spur inflation that would erode the purchasing power of bonds.

“Short term market moves lead to gains and losses, but over the 14 years since we started investing, the overall trend is upwards,” Hiroyuki Mitsuishi, a councilor at GPIF, said at a press conference in Tokyo. “Don’t evaluate the results over the short term, as looking over the long term is important.”

It really was a bad quarter, truth be told. I’m not sold on the idea that pension funds should be so aggressive, unless of course it’s worth betting it all on black. I’m a fan of that approach. Go big or go home. In this case, unfortunately, the kamikazi dive bombers at GPIF went home with a big fat zero, no pun intended.

It’s all fun and games until your book is on fire.