Amateur Musician, Roger McNamee, Says Bitcoin is in a Bubble

McNamee, founder of the small traveling band dubbed Flying Other Brothers, was interviewed by Bloomberg today about the future of bitcoin and the blockchain, to which he flatly stated that it was in a bubble.

When asked about the long term viability of the cryptocurrency, McNamee said it was ‘too early to tell.’

Aside from his musical career, McNamee was an early investor in Facebook, former co founder of Silverlake Partners and now runs a small boutique hedge fund named Elevation Partners.

In related news, Fuck Token is down 8% today, reducing its market cap to just $2.3m.

The entire market cap of the cryptocurrency market, including Fuck Token, now stands at $172 billion.

Surprisingly, it isn’t in the tech space. It’s Aluminum.

The worst is actually oil and gas drilling, off 44% on a median basis this year. But the close second one is a much great threat to the economy and our way of life: Department Stores.

To make money in this tape was simple this year. All you had to do was avoid oil and retail and get long a diversified basket of stocks — staunchly avoiding taking risks via overweight positions.

Question: if the economy is truly gearing up for a leg up, why isn’t oil trending higher now, especially with the dollar so weak?

Last year, Sec. Lew announced that ‘slave holding’ Andrew Jackson would be ousted from the $20 bill, in favor of Harriet Tubman. There was a great debate over this and Lew’s final decision to leave Hamilton intact, thanks to fervent lobbying by the cast of the Broadway play Hamilton, was lauded and praised by President Obama.

Now that nazis are in charge of the White House, it looks like that plan has been sidetracked, setting aside identity politics for a moment in favor of more pressing things.

CNBC’s Steve Liesman tried to goad Sec. Mnuchin into this debate this morning. Here was the brief exchange.

I realize there are lots of racist nazis on this website too. But the question remains, should all slaveholders be removed from US currencies?

We’ve all seen the gigantic cocked run in the semis over the past two years. Everyone is in awe over the gains in AMD and NVDA. Jefferies is out with a note today, discussing their 4 top picks for the next year, 3 of which are common dinner table stocks, the other a new one that might be of interest to you.

AMD ($19 pt)

“AMD discussed positive market reaction to its server MPU [micro processing unit], EPYC, which follows the successful launch of its high end desktop MPU, Ryzen. Our own checks indicate interest in EPYC from five separate hyperscale [data center] players, and a tightness in supply of EPYC MPUs. Management also expressed confidence in its ability to achieve its target gross margin bogey of 40-44%.”

NVDA ($180 pt)

Nvidia “management believes that its data center business is still in the early innings and expressed confidence in its opportunities for growth in both the training and inferencing markets. The company believes it is moving closer to broader deployment of its Auto platform, Drive-PX2, and also believes its gross margins continue to drift up.”

XLNX ($78 pt)

“XLNX noted its software development environment (SDAccel) is now in private beta at AMZN. This expands the pool of programmers that can access FPGAs [field-programmable gate arrays] in the cloud, and is a step towards AMZN’s vision of accelerating applications on AWS [Amazon Web Services] using FPGAs without users having to do any extra programming.”

And the new one…

SGH ($23 pt)

“The mix of smartphones continues to trend towards premium models with higher memory configurations, driving content for SGH’s Brazil Memory business. We think this content and ASP [average selling price] growth translates to operating leverage on SGH’s manufacturing assets there.”

SGH is sharply higher today, as traderfags jump at the opportunity to climb aboard the next potential winner.

Here’s what I have on SGH. Any input is appreciated.

Stifel initiates SGH with a Buy and price target of $27. They view SGH’s segment as poised to benefit from the increased importance of memory in the datacenter architecture. As the rate of CPU improvement slows, they see data center customers looking elsewhere in the architecture to drive overall system gains. As memory evolves beyond a commodity, firm expects increased uses for SMART’s specialty memory products which can deliver solutions that larger memory cos are unwilling to dedicate the resources to address. They also believe SGH is poised to benefit from increased smartphone adoption in Brazil and local content laws that should amplify the organic growth rate.

Needham initiates SGH with a Strong Buy and price target of $20, highlighting co as a global memory company with three distinct business units: Specialty Memory, Brazilian Memory Products (DRAM and mobile memory), and Logistics Services. With a flexible business model focused on specialized markets, they believe SGH is on the cusp of revenue expansion via growing specialty memory products sold into servers, networking and telecom as well as a huge Brazilian market opportunity propelled by changing regulations in local content requirements for mobile memory, which is expected to increase from 40% in 2016 to 50% in 2017, and 60% in 2018. With a strong specialty memory division and revenue expansion in Brazil via expanding content regulations, firm believes SGH is worth $20 on a P/E of 7.3x and a EV/S of 0.6x on calendar year 2018 ests.

Via Briefing.com

Headquartered in California, SGH is a specialty memory manufacturer, providing chips for desktops, notebooks, servers, and smartphones. In addition to selling memory units to the Brazilian market, the company sells specialty memory to original equipment manufacturers from around the world. The company works with OEMs to develop memory that matches customer-specific requirements. SGH has relationships with industry heavyweights like Cisco Systems, Samsung, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell, and LG, among others.

The company has been in business since 1992 and operations in Brazil began in 2002. More than 480 workers are employed in Brazil, where the company processes imported wafers and cuts, packages, and tests them to create memory components used to manufacture modules, flash-based products, and other memory. There is no other company in Brazil that packages and tests mobile memory for smartphones.

The Brazilian business focuses mostly on Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) components and modules for desktops, notebooks, and servers. The company believes that Brazilian content and tax regulations provide financial incentives to customers to procure locally manufactured memory products. The company has leveraged its experience and success in DRAM to expand into the mobile memory arena.

Its specialty memory solutions business has a portfolio of more than 2,000 products, including all generations of DRAM, embedded and removable Flash, enterprise memory, hybrid memory, and non-volatile memory solutions. The company also helps customers manage supply chain planning and execution, reducing costs and increasing productivity.

When I was younger, I used to methodically target people who shorted stocks that were heavily shorted. The theory was, during periods of excess, heavily shorted stocks would become ‘barn burners’, trapping shorts inside a house that was aflame. My purpose was merely to squirt gasoline at the house, roasting marshmallows and eating snacks, taking in the fumes of burning flesh with delight (no serial killer).

With Hurricanes menacing America, sweeping away whole cities, now is the perfect time to apply the figure four leg lock to shorts and target their favorite stocks.

Here are a few names, courtesy of Exodus, that might become enclosed burning coffins for bears soon.

RES, CRC, CAR, CZR, MTCH, GOGO, P, MNDK, NK, BLUE, IMMU, REGI, WLL

There are many ways to win with the above stocks. However, no win will be sweeter than the one presiding over the grave of a bear. They’re like nazis, but worse. They literally want to see markets go down and old people die of thirst. If you see a bear, punch a bear. If you know of a stock that is heavily shorted, buy it and make the shorts lose all of their money, property and family. After their wives divorce them and their kids come to learn how evil their Dad’s were, you can then throw gigantic parties celebrating your success.

I see there’s another hurricane, named Irma, heading towards the east coast. It should become a Cat 4 soon and my only generator is broken. It looks like I might soon float away. No worries, “The Fly” is equipped with a space capsule and will simply ‘zip’ away from the floods to come.

Stocks are fucking ripping again. Nothing gets the animals spirits going like death, mayhem and destruction.

More than 50 NASDAQS have been added to the national treasury. In addition to that, gold is, once again, much higher — by 0.6%. Did I mention that I am heavily long gold? I’ll need it when my house is destroyed by Irma.

WTI is higher by 2.6% and Brent even more. The spread between WTI and Brent widened after Texan refineries went offline. There simply wasn’t demand for crude, since they were closed. As they begin to reopen, expect the spread between Brent and WTI to tighten again.

This is truly a great day for stocks. Healthcare is up most and everyone I know is simply lying around eating grapes, drinking gin fizzes, having a grande olde time.

The good news gleaned from this amateur footage taken by a woman who was afflicted by Hurricane Harvey was that someone had the heart to stand up to savage looters. The man featured below is self-described former law enforcement, holding down his neighborhood from these vile creatures.

About midway through the video, the same woman made a claim that criminals were posing as rescue boat operators and robbing people. She said she was afraid to call for a rescue boar because of the robberies being reported. If true, this is one of the lowest form of thievery I’ve ever heard of — utterly disgraceful.

UPDATE: Some tech snob said the fact that Wikileaks.org was showing someone else content didn’t mean it was hacked.

No, Wikileaks did NOT get hacked. Some punks in Europe got an admin to mod a DNS record is all. Use the IP: https://195.35.109.53/

— TruthInGovernment (@TruthinGov2016) August 31, 2017

At any rate, Wikileaks is back up.

Some might believe these two events aren’t connected — but maybe they are.

FBI just refused someone's FOIA request for Clinton probe files claiming a lack of public interest. Thanks FBI. You keep @WikiLeaks strong.

— Julian Assange ? (@JulianAssange) August 30, 2017

I think it’s fair to say that any documents released by the FBI belonging to Hillary Clinton are of immense public interest. Well, Ty Clevenger, a NYC attorney, made a FOIA request in March of 2016, requesting to see documents from the FBI and DOJ and was denied. The FBI replied to Ty, saying (we) “determined you have not sufficiently demonstrated that the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs personal privacy interests of the subject.”

“You must show that the public interest sought is a significant one”

– David M. Hardy of the FBI’s Records Management Division

“Therefore, records regarding your subject are withheld pursuant to FOIA exemptions,” David M. Hardy of the FBI’s Records Management Division told Clevenger.

Hahahaha, eternally beat down. Trump is powerless.

All Clevenger wants to do is prove she committed perjury and hopefully DIE IN JAIL.

“Frankly, I am stunned I should have to explain why my request pertains to a matter of public interest,” Clevenger wrote in an Aug. 11 letter to the FBI.

pic.twitter.com/ZptxnlqlLk

— Goldfinger (@sjoynson) August 31, 2017

In other news, Wikileaks was hacked tonight by some group. I am sure the CIA had nothing to do with it.

Wikileaks got hacked pic.twitter.com/sUaWvzaH1N

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) August 31, 2017

If you thought Bonald Drumpghhf was gonna pardon his way out of his acts of treason, think again. Politico reported tonight that special prosecutor Mueller is teaming with with NY’s AG Schneiderman to form Voltron — a robot designed to pressure Manafort into destroying Trump.

The angle here is the NY AG would menace Manafort with charges for crimes in NY that cannot be pardoned by Trump, since it’s on a state level. Chequemate or not?

In order for this scheme to pan out, a few things must occur first. Let’s go over the short list.

Manafort had to break laws that can be used against him to testify against Trump.

Also, Trump had to do something wrong.

Also, Manafort had to have knowledge of Trump’s crimes.

Also, Manafort would have to be able to prove Trump was working with Russians.

All that aside, the more pertinent question here is how did Politco get this story and why is Mueller leaking to the media? Trumpsters will downplay this as ‘another nothingburger’ that will end up bearing zero fruit. But I see this very differently. We have an acting special prosecutor who is trying his best to take down the President of the United States, including leaking to the media to ‘send a message’ to Trump that he cannot pardon his way out of this mess.

For Mueller to be this brazen, he must have something on Trump, or possess a high degree of confidence in being able to nail Trump via Manafort or one of his associates.

Just think about what’s taking place here. Dozens of lawyers are working in Trump’s AG office to take him down, leaking to leftist media tidbits that are designed to embolden anti-Trumpers and demoralize the President’s base.

Here’s a very giddy Chris Hayes reporting on the matter, on the phone with the reporter from Politico that scored this story.

UPDATE: Maxine Waters is ‘excited’ over the Mueller-NY AG team up.

Lt. Gen. Honore was in charge of the Katrina response in New Orleans 12 years ago and warned CNN’s Eric Burnett that ‘night is coming’ — saying it was going to get a lot worse before it got better.

Honore carefully crafted his words and slammed the response in Houston as being grossly inadequate, disgusted by the fact that they didn’t even have 100 helicopters in the city to do search and rescues. He harkened back to the Katrina rescue plan where the 5th army (engineers) used a ‘significant grid system’ for search and rescue. Now, according to Honore, ‘it looks like no one in Texas ever read the plan.’

“You have to come in big and you’ve got to be there right at the edge of the storm so you can come in as soon as possible and go in and rescue people.

Back during Katrina, Honore said they had 240 helicopters and 40,000 national guard within the first 4 days, orders of magnitude more than what’s on the ground in Texas now.

“They just got 100 helicopters here. Something is significantly wrong with command and control and they need to stop patting each other on the back who are waiting to get rescued.”

“I know I’m sounding critical,” Honore acknowledged as he called for an “Army response to local civil disasters.

“They’ve come upon a time when their mission is too big for the state National Guard — and they need to get the hell over it and bring them in when they have a big mission.”

Watch.