In a year that is making fools of all high profile money managers, I find no reason to believe why this latest call out of Dan Loeb won’t come back to throw eggs all over his face.
“The environment for short selling is also attractive and we have more single short names than long positions in our book today,” Loeb wrote in the letter dated Oct. 30.
“We have reduced our net exposure by nearly a third through sales and new shorts over the past few months while maintaining significant positions in our highest conviction, event-rich names,” he wrote, without identifying the new positions.
He said that the fund’s biggest winners for the third quarter included Kraft Heinz and eBay, plus an unnamed position called “short A.” The biggest losers during the quarter include SunEdison, Dow Chemical Co., Amgen Inc. and Yum! Brands.
Einhorn, Icahn and Ackman have been marginalized this year, without question. Dan Loeb’s Third Point had a solid October, up 4.7%, following a horrific summer where his fund lost 8.9%. Let’s see if his latest call to be net short stocks, heading into the final two months of the year, pays off.
I’m such a dired pessimist. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m also a fatalist, essentially not really giving a shit, I would’ve sold my stocks and waited for the market to crater.
The Option Addict said this would happen and it looks like it might be starting to get colorful around here.
During the iBC Conference, he told us to look out for the smaller cap names starting to make a move in this rally.
Look at the medicine man stocks today.
I happen to be long the space in decent size, with positions in JAZZ, NK, CNC, ICPT, GILD, XON and SGEN. Shit, I hadn’t realized until now how much of a medicine man fan I truly am.
Shares of SHAK are exploding higher on news that the pole smokers who make burritos at CMG are poisoning people. The American burrito eater shall be converted to a hammed burger face shoveler. It has been written and it shall be so.
Someone said they “loved Citron’s moxy” for posting scandalous shit about Valeant; then I punched him in the face.
I love a good bar fight, especially ones when stools come into play and heads get cracked open. But this piling on by Citron, regarding VRX, is text book absurdity.
Day after day, those little greedy fuckers hop onto Bloomberg teevee to discuss VRX. They taunt Bill Ackman with their tweets. And now, after all the free press, analyst downgrades, public humiliation of one of America’s most successful money managers, they issue another report on VRX.
Don’t give me this last word crap, regarding how awful a company VRX is and how you’re simply looking out for the little guy–not to get burned.
You know, the ancient greeks wrote fables about people like you, little greedy fuckers who got their hands stuck in the dike.
I see it now: VRX surges and cuts the arms and legs off from all of your little followers, the last guys into the fray. You know, the people you got liquid on when you covered your short.
I sense Ackman’s revenge is near, the sort of vengeance that inspired whole chapters in the holy bible.
CMG is down around 5% this morning, after news that the meat they sell on the west coast is fucking poisonous.
After being notified by health department officials in the Seattle (Wash.) and Portland, Ore. areas that they were investigating approximately 20 cases of E. coli, including people who ate at six of our restaurants in those areas, we immediately closed all of our restaurants in the area out of an abundance of caution,” Chipotle said in an emailed statement.
The company said the vast majority of its stores in the area had reported no problems. “We offer our deepest sympathies to those that have been affected by this situation.”
It is the third outbreak of food contamination at Chipotle restaurants since August. Those earlier cases involved salmonella and the highly infectious virus norovirus.
Dollars to donuts says the ecoli emanated from the ground beef, because it’s not grass fed. Cows can’t process corn, genetically modified or not. When we were kids, all of the beef was grass fed. This isn’t some hipster movement, based off some wacky idea. This is science. Eat grass fed beef; avoid being poisoned to death by ecoli.
This is some quality research from the lads over at Goldman. After a debilitating share price decline, God’s men downgraded shares of VRX to neutral, “moving to the sideline” if you will.
“Given the events that have transpired very rapidly in recent weeks that have raised many questions about certain aspects of VRX’s business model, we have less confidence the market will reward the stock anytime soon without clarity as to the path forward,” wrote Nachman. “We move to the sidelines until there is further visibility on how management will repair the reputational damage to the company, as well as grow its business effectively in this increasingly challenging environment.”
The fuckery is so real, hardly anyone can believe it.
I write to you in the top of the 12th inning, watching the MLB world series.
The Mets have lost, assuredly. The Kansas City Royals, which isn’t even a city in Kansas (WTF is up with that?) have won the World Series. My original prejudice lied in the beards of the Royals, a wholly disgusting set of future crystal meth addicts spending idle time as youngsters about the baseball field. There was no way the Royals could beat the NY Mets, since the midwest is a silly part of the United States, never to be taken seriously, especially by learned men of the east coast. I looked at men like Moustakas and Hochevar and thought it’d be impossible to beat the Mets and anyone who thought otherwise were delirious with insanity.
But then I saw these animals play ball and I was impressed. These Royals are a savage clan, the sort of men who’d rather cannibalize their entire village than go a day without food. Regarding the state of Missouri: there is nothing worse than Missouri. It represents the very worst of this country, both intellectually and culturally. I mean, look at Eric Hosmer and tell me what you find redeeming.
The reason why the Mets lost is because of their owner, Frederick Wilpon. A former friend of the infamous Bernard Maddof, Frederick had profited from the ponzi scheming ways of Bernie; and as a result, was litigated against and told to give back upwards of $160 million in illicit gains from the famed mountebank. In other words, until the NY Mets are sold to a person who isn’t guilty of the very worst crimes known to mankind, they will never win a World Series.
I am not emotionally invested in the NY Mets and have not been emotional about sporting events since the day I became an adult. I wish the KC Royals good fortune in their much deserved World Series win and hope that it brings a semblance of pride and honor to the obese and degenerate people of Kanas City, persons more interested in the spices in their BBQ sauce than their industrial capacity.
Thanks to my cult-like personality (drink the kool-aid), I was able to secure dozens of resumes for a job that paid zero and offered nothing else but the glory and privilege to blog aside a living legend in finance blogging. I sincerely thank all who applied for the job, to be part of the second launching of the Peanut Gallery, aka iBC Blogging network.
We tried this endeavor several years back and it didn’t work out. We had hundreds of bloggers; but it was a fucking disgraceful mess. With this iteration, my intent was to hand pick the first 5, treat it as a blogging internship, where I would keep in touch and guide the young blood on how to properly attract an audience.
After careful consideration, here is the first 5 (twitter handles) of what I expect to be a very large and burgeoning community of finance bloggers, whose goal is to uplift the drek of 140 character bullshit to a realm that appreciates the written word.
Just when you though the Greek boogeymen were tucked away, locked in the closet: they reemerge with a fresh appetite for some new, cold, hard, cash.
“The keys to voluntary investor participation in the capital raises will be clarity regarding the ultimate capital structure and the extent of the government’s participation in the governance of the banks,” Ross, chairman of WL Ross & Co. said after the release of the ECB’s so-called comprehensive assessment for Greek lenders on Saturday. “Investors will not be comfortable with committing new equity capital to banks that are effectively nationalized,” the billionaire investor, who holds a stake at Eurobank Ergasias SA, said.
The ECB asset-quality review identified 9.2 billion euros of valuation adjustments for National Bank of Greece SA, Piraeus Bank SA, Eurobank and Alpha Bank AE, the Frankfurt-based supervisor said Saturday. The banks’ capital gap amounted to 14.4 billion euros under a simulated stress test scenario, and 4.4 billion euros under baseline macroeconomic assumptions. The four banks will have to submit recapitalization plans to the ECB’s supervisory arm by Nov. 6.
“Raising funds will clearly be difficult,” Arturo Bris, a finance professor at IMD business school IB Lausanne, said in a phone interview Sunday. “A solution can be a government-sponsored plan that takes care of the bad part of the banking system, while the good part becomes marketable.”
Under European stress tests, apparently all of the Greek banks are without proper funding.
So, how many of you are interested in some Greek bank bonds?
I could go cliche and choose Halloween; but that’d be lame. By the way, the Michael Myers mask was actually a cheap Captain Kirk mask purchased in Hollywood. It was an extremely low budget film, that went cult.
My halloween movie pick for 2015 is Trick R Treat, an extremely atmospheric halloween flick, made in 2008. It’s a contemporary classic. It’s not really scary, at least for adults. But it’s well written and it really hones in on the holiday of Halloween, which is pretty cool.
My grandfather used to tell me tales of halloween, growing up in Harlem, NYC, circa 1920’s. Times were tough, so they weren’t tossing protein around like kids in my day. Instead, they put flour into a black sock and used it to pound each other into dust. On occasion, he told me of times they’d store one or two eggs in a drawer for a month or two to make the eggs rotten. He said the stench it’d leave after exploding over someone’s head was enough to kill a mule, or bring back the dead.
When I was growing up, in the 80’s, no one trick or treated. Costumes were no more than a cheap plastic apron, with some bullshit sketched on it. I once walked around as a skeleton, with only the front painted, because that’s all C-town sold that year. For me, in my hood, Halloween was all about destroying the neighborhood and your friends with eggs and shaving cream. My friends and I would save our money and buy dozens and dozens of eggs, multiple cans of shaving cream, then head out to wreak havoc on our neighborhoods.
We’d affix aerosol caps to the shaving cream, so it would spray better. Or, if we couldn’t steal a cap from the local store or find one in our apartments, we’d take the cap, rip out the middle, and use that. It wasn’t aerosol, but it sprayed further than leaving it as is.
Everyone got bombed on Halloween. If you were walking outside and under the age of 18, you got nailed.
Because I lived in an apartment complex, there were rivalries between the buildings. I was lucky enough to live in the building that had the most athletic/most popular kids. Plus, it was like children of the corn around my way, with 30 kids running around without parental supervision, menacing the entire neighborhood. Cops never came by either, mainly because it was a low crime area in those days. Later on, when the neighborhood changed, people got shot, including several of my close friends.
One time we got caught off guard by some elder teens, who chased us into the building amidst eggs flying everywhere. We ran up the stairs, trying to shake them. Some of our slower friends got caught and egged to hell. The interior of the building was completely wrecked, strewn with cracked eggs and mountains of shaving cream. The porter would always get pissed off, cursing at us, telling us to “take this shit to the park.” The day was never complete without the psychotic, STEVE BROWN, dropping gallons of milk down the stairwell from the 7th floor, accompanied by his lunatic whistle to make it sound like it was a bomb dropping out from a bay.
Good times.
Oh, and if you ever yelled at us throughout the year for playing hardball baseball in the parking lot, your door got destroyed on Halloween.
I’ll leave the more extreme Halloween stories for another year.
Happy Halloween. Don’t eat too much candy; it’ll make you sick (Yo Gabba Gabba)
