Candidly, I missed out on this trade. As a point in fact, I cannot recall the last time I played oil correctly. The irony of it all is that I have the keys to the future for this sector, the blueprint that mints money on an annual basis, but because of my proclivities for short term trading, I fall victim to emotion and capitulate before the big wins are enjoyed.
“What the fuck is this guy talking about?”, you ponder? I’ll show you now.
These are the seasonal returns for the oil and gas drilling sector and also COP, which is a great representation for all of crude. Behold as the secrets of the crude trade are reviewed via simple data collection analysis via Exodus. If you only bought oil stocks in Feb and sold in May, your gains would be bountiful and your cock would be swinging very low indeed.
I know what you’re thinking: “this time is different.” But it’s not. The allure of buying at the highs is always strong and new suckers are minted every day. Have a look at the actual price of crude on a seasonal chart. Look how infantile this market is and how easy it is to predict.
This is child’s play. At the very latest, sell all of your crude stocks by June and don’t come back until late January. If you overstay your welcome, I look forward to seeing you fall victim to a Saudi Arabian saber angling sideways and strongly at your manlet neck.
The ‘high level’ US trade delegation is back in the US and by the looks of the futures markets, people like what they see. The US demand is to reduce the US-China trade deficit by ~$200b by 2020, a very reasonable demand. On the other hand, China, in all of its grand fuckery, is demanding US airlines quit referring to Taiwan as a separate nation, which drew a most humorous rebuke from team Trump.
“This is Orwellian nonsense and part of a growing trend by the Chinese Communist party to impose its political views on American citizens and private companies,” Sanders said, adding that the Trump administration is calling on China “to stop threatening and coercing American carriers and citizens”.
Futures are +87, Nasdaq +35. More importantly, WTI is above $70. Quite frankly, and this goes without saying, it warms my heart to see the price of gasoline edging higher at the pump. I enjoy paying a higher fee because it means jobbies are being created in the shale territories, plus my good friend Putin is ballin’ like a mother-llama.
The dollar is sharply higher by 0.4% v the Euro. This should equate to carnage in the gold markets. Since I am long DUST, I look forward to that eventuality.
The only other news that caught my eye was Nestle paying SBUX $7.5b for the rights to sell their coffee products in stores. Considering the entire product line only does $2b in revenues per annum, one has to believe the good folks at Nestle are fucking retarded.
Also, MDLZ is buying Tate’s Cookies for $500m. Not a fan.
Yesterday afternoon I was informed that a childhood friend of mine, one of my very best friends growing up, had taken his own life. The juxtaposition of this news against the backdrop of the beautifully catered party I was attending couldn’t be more drastic. There I was engorging myself with an array of delicacies and my good friend was gone — because of years of addiction, which led to the disintegration of both his body, mind, and his soul.
The first time I met him was in 2nd grade. It was the first day of school and he had just urinated all over himself and was crying because of his shame. The teacher consoled him and asked how she could make him feel better. He turned around from his first row seat and pointed to me in the back and said “I want to sit next to him.” From that day on, we became best friends. His parents always sheltered him and never let him outside. He once reminded me of a story I had forgotten about how I freed him from his parental captivity.
One day I visited his apartment, which I did at least 5 times per week and grabbed him and looked at his Mother and said ‘we’re going out.’ His Mother turned to us and said, ‘wait just a second. He can’t go out.’ And I said, ‘I am taking him out to play with us and there’s nothing more to be said’ and we walked out. He always liked to tell that story and it made me feel good that he remembered me so fondly.
When we were 11 years old, we became obsessed with ninjas, to the point where we dressed up like them and even made Chinese stars out of wood and ran around the neighborhood hitting other kids with our swords, which were stickball bats. To make a dashing escape, we’d light a smoke bomb and kindly ask our enemies to wait the allotted time for the smoke to disseminate before we disappeared into the thin air. We even went to school dressed like ninjas one day, much to the chagrin of our principal.
In our early teens, we used to chase down girls and he always thought every one was in love with him. It could be 10 of us in a group and one girl glancing over at us and he’d say ‘look, she’s checking me out. She wants me.’ And we’d say, ‘how the fuck do you know that — there’s 10 of us here?’ Then he’d reply with a smirk, ‘trust me, she wants me.’
When the neighborhood got bad, his parents moved him to upstate NY. One of the funnier moments I can remember when we visited him up there was when one of our friends was sleeping, he said ‘watch this’ and proceeded to place a hot sauce bottle in his mouth with his zipper down. He nudged my friend awake, and immediately zipped up his pants and said ‘thanks bro, good looking out.’ Bear in mind, this sleeping teenager was a giant, maybe 6’3, 220lbs. He shot up and chased him down the hall, kicking couches out of the way like they were small toys. We quickly diffused it and told him it was a joke and only hot sauce and laughed until our stomachs hurt for a solid 20 minutes.
He was the type of person that everyone liked, easy going, funny, incredibly generous, and kind hearted. He was the life of every party.
Years later when I was starting out in the business and enjoying some success, I hired him to work under me as a stockbroker. We had great times — because he was always adventurous and brave enough to go for the kill. At one point he became slightly obsessed with the movie American Psycho, which spilled into his demeanor at work. After seeing the movie, we both went to the local print shop to upgrade our business cards, in order to attain supremacy over the other plebs at the office. One time during lunch, someone made the egregious error of complimenting him for his dashing navy suit, and actually touched his right shoulder to get a better feel for the high thread fabric. Channeling Patrick Bateman, he looked at this gent dead panned and said ‘the suit, look, but don’t touch’. We then laughed to tears, from the harrowing expression on the face of the poor man who merely wanted to pay a nice compliment.
We had big dreams of making it big on Wall Street, our kids playing together, and growing old with an empire underneath us. He looked up to me like an older brother, always eager to learn and follow in my footsteps; but after the market had crashed in 2001-2002, and the bills started to pile up, he couldn’t stay in a commission only business much longer and he quit the business in favor of a salaried job.
My wife and I used to take the kids and visit him during his summer BBQ’s, which were attended by all of the people who loved him. He’d meet people on the bus and take them home to dinner on the same night. I thought he was crazy for doing that; but he loved to meet new people and really get to know them, not just superficially.
When I moved into my Staten Island home in 2003, he helped me lug my furniture out from Brooklyn, and even drove the truck for me. All he wanted was a few beers and some laughs. When I needed a new bannister sanded and stained, he came over and showed me how to do it. He was a good man and could be trusted with things, but he also had this burning desire to fit in, which I believe was the nascency of his downfall.
I used to compare him to a chameleon — because he’d mimic whoever he was around. When with me, he was Mr. Professional stockbroker. When with losers at a strip club, he acted like them, and so on and so forth. He started smoking weed at any early age, which was encouraged by his parents. We always felt that was a super cool thing, being able to smoke pot with Dad — but with the benefit of hindsight and some years of maturity, I know now it was dysfunctional.
He’d ‘party’ on occasion, dabbling with cocaine, and it got to the point that by 2006 I didn’t want to bring my kids around him anymore. We kept in touch by phone and I was pleased to find out he entered a new career and enjoyed varying degrees of success. With his new found money, he bought a modest home in NJ, a few cars, and a boat. He was very proud of his possessions and his family, and was always entertaining, cooking steaks and lobsters for his guests, denying his 3 children nothing. Then out of the blue, sometime around 2009, he got fired from his high paying job and had to find a new one. Resilient and always up for a fight, my friend hit the pavement and found a new gig within a month. It didn’t pay as much, but it was a job and he was glad to have it.
Money was always a struggle for him, partly due to lack of income, but mostly because he enjoyed to spend whatever he made. He was a pleaser and he really liked to throw big parties.
In 2014, like a complete maniac, he was speeding out of his companies parking lot, and crashed into a car backing out. The subsequent result of this accident led to a serious back injury, which required surgery, and a prescription for oxycontin. The details of what transpired from 2014 until now are somewhat murky to me, mainly because I had not been in contact with him much. But from what I’ve gathered, the injury led to an opioid addiction, which led to him losing his job, his house, his wife and kids, and eventually his life.
When money ran out, he was asking all of his friends for loans, myself included, which were denied because everyone thought the money would be used for drugs. I’m very good friends with his wife’s brother and knew the issues he was battling, but I never reached out because I felt he needed tough love. Everyone struggles and who the hell was he to deserve special treatment? He needed to wake up from his slumber, get back to work, and provide for his family.
His Facebook timeline is the saddest thing a person could ever see — the slow, but subtle, degradation of a once proud and handsome man — reduced to an avatar of his former self.
The last time he asked me for money was in a text and it read something along the lines of ‘hey Fly, I hope all is well with you and your family. I hate to ask this from you — but I really need to borrow some money. I am getting a job in a few weeks and I’ll pay it back. I want to show my children that I can provide for them, pay some bills, and put some food on the table. I love you man.’
At the time my Mother was undergoing open heart surgery and I was in a panicked state for her health. I asked his wife’s brother if any of this was true and he told me it wasn’t — he was merely using this lie to get money for drugs. I can’t say for sure if he was lying or not, but I denied him the loan and said sorry.
On a side note, for those of you who read my books, he was my cold caller named Eric.
About a year ago, he reached out to my former partner and said he was going to kill himself. He said that he had a gun and was in the woods and didn’t want to live anymore. My former partner contacted me and I immediately tried calling him, but my calls were rejected. He instead texted me and we had a sincere back and forth and he told me he wasn’t going to do it. He explained how losing his family was the hardest thing to deal with and that life wasn’t worth living anymore. I replied with the typical platitudes, telling him how much his kids needed him to be strong — not only for clothes and food, but also to be a role model for them.
His Facebook posts have been scarce the past year and the only photos he posted depicted a person I didn’t recognize. My friends told me he had been trying to borrow money for years and that suicide was regularly discussed and one of his very best friends felt he was a lost cause.
Yesterday, on a beautiful spring day in New Jersey, he took his life in a quiet park by strangulation. I can’t help but to feel like I failed him when he needed help most. It’s hard to say, especially since I’ve been a hermit for nearly a decade now. But the signs were everywhere and he was never entered into a drug rehab program, or provided with the level of care a person in his condition required. Instead, he was treated like a malcontent and whisked away.
His favorite foods were filet mignon, lobsters, and carrots with ranch dressing. He sucked at sports and threw like a girl. He loved motorcycles, skateboards, and being outdoors with his boys and dogs. He considered his daughter a princess and wanted only the best for her. He was misguided and too eager to please. In the end, his addiction to opioids led to a nightmarish life and a bad heroin addiction, and his pride didn’t allow the two to coexist.
If by chance you’re reading this my friend, I am sorry for the way things ended and I hope you find the peace in death that you couldn’t find in life.
This is so an under talked about sector that is crushing the market for the past year. I have my excuses, as I was scarred for life in some of these stocks during my Great Apocalyptic Collapse, via the Horsemen of Death, circa 2014. It was a period in time that I dove in sideways and came out mangled like a pretzel, with gargantuan, larger than life, losses in DATA, SPLK, FEYE, and WDAY.
Ever since then, the sector has done quite good and have made plenty of people rich. What’s your excuse for ignoring the sector — too stupid to figure it all out, or too lazy?
I love modeling. The quant strategy in Exodus is based off a model I discovered. Members are more than welcomed to create their own models. Tonight I was reading Elon Musk talking EXTREME shit on Twitter, warning shorts of a terrible carnage.
This is ridiculous.
Looks like sooner than expected. The sheer magnitude of short carnage will be unreal. If you’re short, I suggest tiptoeing quietly to the exit … https://t.co/A0Q90pSLKA
So I started to run some cursory short screens, coupled with our new Sharpe ratio tool and found that stocks that are heavily shorted, with market caps larger than $5b, outperforms that market — bigly. You can dial down the market cap and fiddle with different metrics to find the best combination. While all of this is backwards looking, in my experience trending markets following a neatly knit narrative most of the time, which is why using a quantitative strategy makes so much sense.
This is not a drill. America better build that wall, for all of S. America is on the brink of destruction.
On Friday, the bank hiked rates to 40% from 33.25%, a day after they were raised from 30.25%. A week ago, they were raised from 27.25%.
The rises are aimed at supporting the peso, which has lost a quarter of its value over the past year.
Analysts say the crisis is escalating and looks set to continue.
Argentina is in the middle of a pro-market economic reform programme under President Mauricio Macri, who is seeking to reverse years of protectionism and high government spending under his predecessor, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
Inflation, a perennial problem in Argentina, was at 25% in 2017, the highest rate in Latin America except for Venezuela.
This year, the central bank has set an inflation target of 15% and has said it will continue to act to enforce it.
Argentinian pesos are literally toilet paper.
Best way to see the carnage is via two Argentinian banks traded here: BFR and BMA.
The joint lead managers on this doozy was the usual suspects: BofA Merrill Lynch, Erste Group, Goldman Sachs International , NatWest Markets, and Société Générale CIB.
At the epicenter of the Exodus platform are mean reversion algorithms. For those new jacks on the site who are unfamiliar, it is a method of measuring stress points in the market, cross referencing it against historical movements, and then deducing some intelligence from it.
We do this for the overall market down to the individual stock. One of my favorite tools is the hybrid (cross between fundies and tech) oscillator that shows you the overbought/oversold condition of the sector. From this you can determine whether or not the sector is worth gambling on.
Quit kissing your teeth and BEHOLD what I’m about to show you.
For this demonstration, I am using the price action of QQQ and our tech oscillator. On April 18th, 2018, the QQQ was trading $166, a short term top clearly demonstrated by the chart below. If you saw this on the 18th, you might’ve lightened up or at least held off on any new purchases, yes?
Now for the bottom.
On April 24th, 2018, stocks were sucking dick and the QQQ was knifing lower, trading $158. Look at the chart below you fucking FAGlord — that’s what you call SHOMP (sublime harmony of mathematical precision). None of you ham and eggers can come close to matching this shit here. That was a bottom and markets melted up from there.
What a stupid expression, ‘taking off to the fucking stratosphere’. What am I some rube from Brooklyn, intermingling the price of equities with physical atmosphere? There’s a lot of expressions that should be banned, such as ‘ciao’, or ‘bro’, or ‘having another case of the Mondays I see.’
Markets just legged higher all day…just because. There wasn’t a catalyst. Headlines imply the Buffett buying of Apple as a reason, but that’s poppycock. I suspect it has to do with Trump delegation in China. If those talks are successful, we’ll be off to the races on Monday.
Or, if they fail, we’ll all have a terrible case of the Mondays and might say ciao to any idea of gains. Know what I’m saying, bro?
Just green candles and shit, all day
My quant is +1.1% — but my active portfolio is flat — thanks to getting hemmed up nicely in SOXS. That shit is really nailing the ram to the fucking wall, if you know what I mean.
It’s a very clean rally, very nice, very good — with 75% of stocks higher. Only retail is soft for the day, and of course precious metals — because who needs them?
Dollar up, yields down — causing gold bugs to be raped of their money and honor…again.
The Dollar is +0.6% v Euro today, but gold is hardly changed.
Markets are angling sideways for a move higher off the pivot line, saddled with a hammed sandwich now, so anything could happen.
My bets are exacta. I have all bases covered. Literally nothing can stop me.
Lower yields? Long DRN
Lower stocks? Long SOXS
Perversion? Long YINN
Soda Pop? Long FIZZ
More China gambles? Long ZX
Frankenfood? Long EVGN
Blockchain fever? Long SSC, OSTK
Fuck gold? Long DUST
All of that shit turns out sour, place majority of assets in quant fund that chases alpha and crushes indices.
Like I said, “The Fly” wins all the time. Get used to it — you fools.
Unemployment is at 3.9%, which means you should stop with your fucking #NFPGuesses threads on Twitter. I am going to kill you people for clogging up my timeline with utter horseshit. A great man once said ‘literally everyone is employed now’, and that rings especially true today. Stop making a big deal about jobs.
U-6 has been running just at or above pre-crisis levels — today changed that. Now at its lowest since 2001. pic.twitter.com/pGuc3eyGAQ
1. Yields are dropping. The 10yr is now 2.92%
2. Futures are -90.
3. Trump’s economic China hating team is in China
4. LPNT is being obliterated
5. Dollars are rising hardcore v Euro, +0.6%.
Look you, we’re in a tough tape. This isn’t 2017 and the fucking FagLords aren’t gunning the market higher each and every day anymore. This means we all need to be tactical, swap out of losers fast and try not to exhibit too much zeal when trading. Get out there and get yourselves an Exodus subscription, tap into “The Fly’s” computer brain and behold the grandeur of our AI and mean reversion algorithms.
If you’re going to do this for real — you’ll need to invest a little time and money into the damned job, god damn it.
On the bright side, it’s Friday and Derby Day is tomorrow. I reckon many of you have plans to consume some bourbon with friends and family? Cheer up, Francis, life has a multitude of enchanting things to explore. You only have to look around to appreciate it, the small reveries of life that make it all the more meaningful.
