Oil, Copper Surge Ahead; The Squeeze is On

Both copper and oil are up more than 3%. This is exactly what the market needed to cause a short squeeze, on this Friday afternoon.

Shares of FCX are going absolutely bananas, following the move higher in crude/copper, coupled with their asset sale. This is the single best barometer of risk in this market. This stock, alongside many other commodity related shares, have been on fire for the better part of 3 weeks now.

The S&P is pushing +10% since the bottom. Naturally, there is going to be a need to rest these gains and observe the wall of worry. Right now, there is a lot of energy being spent on annihilating short sellers. Stocks with big short positions are, by far, outstripping those with small bets against them.

Gold is doing well, thanks to a weakening dollar. And bonds are selling off aggressively, which indicates a thaw in the market, as institutions who fled for the safety of government reallocate back into stocks.

Jim Rogers took to Bloomberg teevee to discuss the utterly hopeless plight of the American economy, which is hell bound for a most deleterious recession, according to Jim.

“It’s been seven years, eight years since we had the last recession in the U.S. and normally, historically we have them every four to seven years for whatever reason—at least we always have,” he said. “It doesn’t have to happen in four to seven years but look at the debt, the debt is staggering.”

“If you look at the…payroll tax figures [in the U.S.], you see they’re already flat,” he concluded. “Don’t pay attention to the government numbers, pay attention to the real numbers.”

“It might even turn into a bubble,” he said of the greenback. “I mean, if markets around the world are crashing, let’s just say that scenario happens, everybody’s going to put their money in the U.S. dollar—it could turn into a bubble.”

Singapore Rogers is out of his fucking mind. It’s one thing to make a call. It’s entirely another story to say stuff like this.

These are excellent numbers that possess a combination of strength and weakness that might stoke the flames of speculative fervor while keeping the Fed at bay.

We added 242k new jobs, many of which are comprised of shopping cart fetchers and burgers flippers. Average hourly income dropped by 0.1%, which is the subtle bad news, indicative of a zero wage growth environment.

Futures doubled their gains to +60. I expect the market will close out the week with strength, based off this data.

China has consolidated the US movie theatre industry and now control the largest movie theatre chain in America.

AMC will pay $30 a share for Carmike, which adds up to a total consideration of $1.1 billion. AMC, currently the country’s second-largest theater chain would pass Regal Entertainment Group to be the leader after absorbing No. 4 Carmike.

It’s the latest big splash made by a Chinese company in the U.S. entertainment industry — and second this year for Wanda Group, which paid $3.5 billion for a majority stake in “Jurassic World” production company Legendary Entertainment in January. “Hunger Games” studio Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. inked a coproduction deal with broadcaster Hunan TV last year, and Perfect World Pictures invested $250 million in Universal Pictures’ production slate.

Congrats America. You’ll be speaking Mandarin in no time at all.

Gold is surging again before the most important economic data in quite some time is released today, the jobs report. Should we get a much hotter than expected number, the fed will be emboldened to raise rates.

The yellow metal is up about 1%.

The junior miner ETF, GDX, is up 1.2% in the pre market. It has been a stellar performer in 2016, higher by 44%.

Chase Coleman III was born to be a hedge fund manager. He descends upon America with a bloodline dating back to the nebulous first governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant.

As a young lad running about the mansions of Oyster Bay, Long Island, he befriended the son of legendary investor, Julian Robertson. The rest is history. Chase was granted an opportunity to become a Tiger Cub and showed exemplary energy and had a keen eye out for tech start ups.

“It’s all very well and good to make money in a bull market”. Let’s see you do it in the bear,” a great man once said. Back in 2008, Coleman was rocked for 28%. Dare I say, after a debilitating drawdown of 8.5% in February, it’s happening again.

Hedge fund Tiger Global Management, known for making big bets on technology companies, lost 8.5 percent last month, leaving it down 22.5 percent for the year to date, a person familiar with the numbers said.

The 15-year-old firm oversees a total of $20 billion. Last year, Scott Shleifer replaced Feroz Dewan, who left the firm, in running its public equity business.

In a letter sent to Tiger Global clients earlier this year, the firm acknowledged the rocky start to the year, saying, “Our longs declined considerably but our shorts have not gone down nearly as much.”

Tiger Global is known for making retarded, concentrated, bets on low brow tech companies. His massive losses of 22 some odd percent can be most attributed to cataclysmic declines in RH, DATA, JD and ATHM, just to name a few.

Rumor has it that the boys over at the prim and proper Holland Society in NYC are quite displeased and taken aback by Mr. Coleman III and have let it be known that Governor Stuyvesant would be abhorrently ashamed at the young man for exhibiting inadequate business sense when faced with conditions deemed ‘less than optimal’ for monied men of property.

Chase’s checkered pants have been suspended for an undetermined timeframe.

This should provide further buoyancy for shareholders of FCX, as the company continues to follow through on promises to sell assets in order to deleverage their debt ridden balance sheet.

Freeport-McMoRan Inc.’s agreed to sell part of its stake in a copper-gold project in Serbia to Lundin Mining Corp. for as much as $263 million, as part of its drive to offload assets to cut its debt by about $5 billion.

The current partners in the Timok project are Freeport, who’s the operator, and an affiliate of Reservoir Minerals Inc., Toronto-based Lundin said Thursday in a statement. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter, if Reservoir Minerals declines to exercise a right of first refusal, Lundin said.

Commodity producers including Glencore Plc and Anglo American Plc are selling operations as weaker growth in China and supply gluts continue to weigh on prices and savage profits. Freeport agreed last month to sell an additional stake in an Arizona mine for $1 billion to Sumitomo Metal Mining Co.

Although the timing of these sales are less than ideal, as any sale during duress is. It is absolutely necessary that management continues to deal with the issue of their over leveraged balance sheet in order to prop up the share price. Just know that this stock is subject to a very onerous and dilutive share offering at any time, especially if the stock continues to rally.

Buyer beware.

My laptop exploded, causing me to bring it to the catamites at Apple to fix. As such, I am currently unable to screen grab video content for the readers in these fine halls.

In all of my years alive, which is more than 1,000 (The Fly is immortal), I’ve never seen a debate as biased as the one broadcasted by the primadonna, corrupt, hacks on Fox News tonight.

The booze hound in chief, Chris Wallace, interrogated Trump for more than 5 minutes in an absurd exchange that had the feeling of a trial, instead of an impartial forum to discuss the topics.

Fox News even prepared themselves for a Trump rebuttal with unbelievable infographics that were projected onto the screens of viewers, in an effort to minimize Trump.

Rubio has been especially energetic in his attacks upon Trump, in seemingly coordinated attacks parsed between him and Ted Cruz. The moderators at Fox New, post haste, pressed Donald on the topics broached by Romney and again repeated by Rubio and Cruz, such as “will you release the NYT off the record interview tapes?”

The answer to their questions, unequivocally, was no.

Watching this debate and absorbing the vitriolic rhetoric by the media has reminded me why I’ve avoided politics for the better part of 10 years. Bear in mind, before I blogged about finance, I was a political blogger who had some pretty impressive stories, one of which grabbed a Drudge Report headline.

The sandbox of politics is one imbued with a brand of hatred and discord that repulses me. I will not avoid the subject, however, since the outcome of these elections will have a profound impact on the values assigned to my beloved stocks.

If you’re a republican, this is a completely bird-brained attack on the GOP front runner, Donald Trump. In today’s bizarre and scathing rebuke of Trump, Romney called him a ‘con-man’ and imbued the discussion with the trifecta of toxic GOP-political horseshit.

1. Trump is somehow appealing to the KKK; therefore, if you vote for him, you are a Klansman.

2. Trump is hiding like a squirrel. It’s obvious that his tax returns are fraudulent. Moreover, if released, it will reveal a great crime. TRUMP DOESN’T DONATE TO CHARITY AS MUCH AS HE SHOULD, ESPECIALLY VETS. Ooh. Shots fired!

3. Trump is a liberal in GOP checkered pants clothing. It’s evident by the fact he is, once again, hiding information from you, this time in the form of a NY Times interview that has him saying all sorts of scandalous shit. It’s rumored he said he wasn’t that serious about immigration. It’s all part of his parlour trick to be the Commander in Chief, something that’s on his bucket list of things to do in this lifetime.

This screed is nothing short of GOP hari-kari, throwing their best chance at Presidential winship by the wayside because, quite frankly, a Hillary Clinton win is more appealing to the oligarchy of big republican business, than the disrupter, Donald Trump. This attack isn’t intended to stop Trump from winning the delegates needed to become the GOP candidate. His nomination, according to the laws of math, is already a foregone conclusion. This attack is geared to grease the old and corrupt wheels of the Clinton attack apparatus, giving them red meat to throw into the crowd during future interviews and public speeches.

The two party system is looking more and more like one giant party hell bent on fucking the American people at every bend.

Famed banking analyst, M. Mayo, took B. Gross to task today, proclaiming the banks are more resilient now than in decades. More importantly, he likens them to a ‘coiled spring’, ready to pounce higher should anything in the broader economy improve.