Remember When Banks Were Important?

This is from a story highlighting the fact that in 2018, upwards of $2.5 trillion will be spent on buybacks, dividends, and mergers. It’s all very hedonistic and makes me cringe when I think about how easy these CEOs have it now.

But the cross section of how these buybacks are happening is somewhat revealing. I remember a time, not too long ago, when banks were God and tech were broke ass bitches. The world has indeed changed.

I’m gonna give you my picks here — because I don’t give a fuck. I do this on a daily basis and today’s winners will be tomorrow’s trash. This is what I’m doing with my life — what are you doing?

Going ahead and pretend you’ve got something similar in your accounts? I’ll wait. After this run, I’ll lay dormant, fuck around with some trades that go nowhere, and then all of you dogs will be back here shitting inside of the comments section, talking about how Fly lost his magical wizard wand. Guess what, faggots, that’ll never happen.

Earlier in the year we were banging out 100% gains inside of a few days with the blockchain craze. Tell me you forgot that already? Now I got stocks like IQ (+45% from basis), ZUO (+25% from basis), SMAR (+22% from basis), and HUBS (+8% from basis) — and that’s nothing. I’ll sell all of these stocks right now and burn the profits on a case of champagne. This is child’s play.

Just wait and see what type of trades I’ll be banging out, if this market keeps doing what it’s doing.

I’ll let you in on a fact, something that I’ve known since I began trading when I was 11 years old: no one is better at handling bull runs better than The Fly. Absolutely fucking no one.

Don’t believe me?

Watch SOGO. If SOGO doesn’t break $13 by the end of this week, I’ll cut my dick off and live stream it.

IQ shot out of the gates like a bankrobber loose at the Federal Reserve, busting thru $30 with indecorous decorum. My ZUO is raising hell, matching gains in IQ, higher by 7.5%. And, of course, my doubled up position in SMART is +3.1%, for a gentile sojourn into the bowels of Wall Street.

With this new verve spreading across the landscape, I should be recoiling, fearing some sort of bad omen on the horizon. But instead of doing that, I am buying MOAR.

This morning I stepped in and about two — one software play and another China.

PVTL
SOGO

Clean Fucking Breakout (CFB)

With the latter, this is textbook shit, clean breakout. Now I can start calling them “the Google of China”, fully ignoring Baidu. Truth is, they’re more like the Bing of China. Nevertheless, this little fucker is going higher.

Stocks are +200 and you have nothing to fear but greed itself.

NOTE: By the time I finished this post, IQ gave up it’s gains. Still long, not deterred, +50% from basis.

Here’s an analyst with cognitive dissonance, strongly suggesting the fears of Amazon disrupting and racking retail into ashes is overblown. He believes now is the time to bear down and barrel in some shares of M. Yummy.

Analyst Omar Saad, who “double-upgraded” his rating on shares of the iconic department store to “long” from “short” over the weekend, said that Wall Street’s fear about a “retailpocalypse” stemming from Amazon’s ascent are overblown.

“In a nutshell, we are convinced that old-world brands and retailers are figuring out how to manage inventory and market to consumers in the digital era, a critical turning point for the sector,” Saad wrote in a note published Sunday. “Macy’s and others will have equal opportunity in the coming years to compete for the attention of discretionary consumers given a core set of competitive advantages that are not going away.”

“Multi-year share price underperformance and still modest valuations despite a very healthy consumer macro environment tell us that the market is still married to the sensational ‘retailpocalypse’ narrative which assumes that Amazon and other digital disruptors will continue unabated,” he added. That’s “a viewpoint with which we no longer agree.”

“A centralized pool of inventory will enable Macy’s to service the same (if not more) demand with less inventory, an incredibly healthy dynamic. In recent years, Macy’s has been implementing processes to improve inventory flow and management,” he wrote. “These efforts are just starting to pay off, with inventory continuing to decline over the past year while retail gross margins held relatively steady and finally inflected to positive in the first quarter of 2018.”

Let’s have a look at the numbers, shall we. Macro stuff, not this horseshit about M being able to manage their inventory better. Let’s look at this so called Amazon threat and if it’s real.

In the apparel sector, composite revenues that past 12 months were $107 billion. Free cash flow was just $6.4 billion. Quarterly revenue grow was up 5.3%, while earnings -24%. The median return for the apparel sector, YTD, is +6.7%. Nice showing, pretty much in line with revenue growth.

In the major department chains, including M, sales were $123 billion, with FCF of $1.7 billion. Nice fucking margins there. Quarterly revenue growth was +1.7%, while earnings growth was +55%, impressive thanks to gains at DDS, KSS, and M. YTD returns were a paltry +4.2%, thanks to major drawdowns in JCP and SHLD. If you ex them out, gains are in the 25-40% ballpark.

Finally, specialty retail had revenues of $128b, with +4.1b in FCF. Quarterly revenues were +7.9%, while earnings -1.7%. YTD, stocks are -7.5% on a median basis and that includes NFLX in the industry.

Meanwhile, over in Amazon land, sales were $113b, with $6.7b in FCF. Revenue growth was +42%, earnings +125%. Stock is up 40% YTD and they’re just getting warmed up.

Conclusion: there is a resurgence taking place at M, KSS, DDS and a handful of other retailers, perhaps at the expense of SHLD and JCP. Bottom line: the mall is still dead and the retail landscape is not any healthier today than last year, when compared to the Amazon threat.

How many fucking times do I have to tell you about the seasonality Gods and how they rule over the domain of oil with an iron fist?

Here, have another God damned look.

Don’t worry, I’m not mad at you or anything like that. I just had to walk my fucking coyote and she was especially virile this morning, attempting to bite a rabbit here, a school bus there, all the while my fucking allergies went haywire and I’m over there sneezing like a fool, having my arm ripped out of my socket, at the same the fattest fucking joggers in the neighborhood roll past me drawing the teeth out of my dog with kids on bikes whirring by with their mohawk helmets. School busses honking — birds fluttering, squirrels racing up trees, and rabbits jumping into bushes. She lost her shit.

But now I’m home and the central cooling system is filtering out the earth from outside and I took an allergy pill, so I’m feeling somewhat better.

Let’s talk about the market.

Stocks look great, oil is shit, and Bitcoin is a joke and dead.

That’s all there is to it.

Let’s keep this even simpler. Best place to put money in equities now is software and Chinese stocks.

I told you to get involved in HUYA, BILI, and IQ — but you chose to buy some faggot oil stock and now you’re hating life. Listen to me now, software and Chinese, Chinese and software. That’s it and that is all.

Software: SMAR, HUBS, ZEN, ZUO
Chinese: HUYA, BILI, IQ, and maybe some YY

The names rotate on a daily basis, so keep up in Exodus or keep reading here. “The Fly” cannot be denied, stopped, or contained.

Two days ago, on my way out to walk my rescue coyote, she nearly took my hand off when she bolted out of the house chasing down some deer, who were stupidly eating a bush on my front lawn. My index finger scraped against the storm door and resulted in a very bloody finger and deep gash, which drew nothing but elation and pride — seeing that I truly have a deranged animal who is loyal to me in my company. Why, with her by my side, I can literally train her to eat people.

There isn’t a day that goes by when she doesn’t try to eat another animal, attack the tires of a moving school bus, a bicyclist, or a fucking jogger.

I have two dogs, one a rescue, the other we bought from the store at 4 months old. The home grown one is a gigantic pussy and everyone in the neighborhood likes her. But now when I walk the rescue, people get off the sidewalk and carry about their journey in the streets — where they belong.

Good news on the cowardly dog front: the coyote’s animalistic fervor is rubbing off on the Carlton Banks of dogs, and my home grown dog is joining in on the attacks when sojourning on joint trips.

Yesterday we went to the dog park and the coyote immediately asserted her alpha by violently attacking “Racer”, the resident pack leader.

My allergies are going crazy this time of year. Whenever I head outside, it debilitates me for a solid three hours of sneezing penance. I’m popping claritins with my cold brew coffee and tossing in some extra creatine, so that when I sneeze, my lungs get stronger. I find running the central cooling system 24 hours per day helps, so I set the fan to on and proceed to freeze out everyone else in the house until I stop sneezing. I haven’t stopped sneezing since mid May.

I visited Cape May last week. It was my first time down there and I enjoyed it a lot, especially the old victorian homes — all very ornate and haunting. The water at the beach was very warm too, which was surprising since the weather has been anything but hot.

I look forward to Monday’s trade and expect the gains to continue. However, seeing the run I’ve been on, I am somewhat hesitant to take on brand new positions. Who am I kidding? I’ll never stop chasing the dream of uninterrupted success.

Happy Sunday.

People want to engorge themselves in leisure. This is a worldwide phenomenon. Productivity is spiraling lower and everyone thinks they’re celebrities, living lavish lifestyles, spending above their means. When at home, instead of reading a book or learning how to sow or do drywall, men take to the teevee with their wives for entertainment, eating grapes and empanadas, acting like real faggots in the process.

Netflix is at the forefront of this new brand form of hedonism, second only Amazon, who after racking the shopping malls across the country into ruin, have now moved onto the next phase of their business: destroying the productivity of the world.

Year to date, NFLX is +87%, while AMZN is +40%.

On a price to sales basis, NFLX is at 11x. Over in dog eating China, their version of Netflix is a company called iQIYI Inc — ticker symbol is IQ. I am long.

They did sales of $3.01b, +55% YOY. They have 424 million active users on the PC and 51 million paid users, +68%. They operate on a freemium model, like Spotify. They kick lots of ass, is a spin off of Baidu — who still owns 70%, and is protected by a gigantic communist moat that would kill people to protect their business.

While Netflix enjoys a global distribution channel, one can make a strong argument that dominating the Chinese market for entertainment deserves more than a meager 7x trailing sales. If IQ were to trade on par with NFLX, the stock would be $47.

Are you long? If not, is something wrong with your brain?

Towards the end of the day, I sold out of my doubled up BITA position and rolled half the proceeds into more SMAR — which is a double up in its own right. Quite sincerely, and very seriously, my gains have not been this extreme since the blockchain days of December 2017.

Also, free trials for Exodus have ended today, with maybe a dozen or so expiring tomorrow. I entreat all of you to join and for former members to re-join, as I’ve taken on renewed vigor in creating value for users. I’m doing a lot of education pro-tips and it is my desire to unleash the power of the platform for each and every user. I will not accept failure. If you sign up and don’t get it, I will call you myself and slap the shit out of you until you get it.

Heading into the weekend, I stand before you an EXTREME winner — long IQ, ZUO, SMAR, ENPH, SHAK, HUBS, ZEN and several other stocks of fashionable comportment.

I have three stocks up double digits today: BITA, ZUO, and IQ.

What are you doing with your lives?

Discretionary account up a cool 5% today, long a double dipped average upped BITA from the $23’s. I edged into that fucker sideways and have now turned up vertical — skyrocketing with my balls flapping in the wind heading for the sun.

Let this be a lesson to all of you ham and eggers out there: never bet against “The Fly”, do so wittingly, end up in the back of a courtroom during bankruptcy proceedings.

I bought into ZUO in spite of today’s jump — based off better than expected results. These guys make a killer app for SAAS companies. At this point, buying stocks that fuel growth in SAAS is the single best place to put money. I cannot stress this enough.

My current SAAS portfolio includes: SMAR, ZEN, HUBS and ZUO.

Other stocks in my discretionary account ripping tits are BITA, IQ, and ENPH.

I cannot be stopped and will never lose again.

UPDATE: