The Return of the Peanut Gallery

Last go around for the Peanut Gallery was several years ago, an open blogging forum that iBC hosted for scores of vagrants and intellects alike. For me, it was a grande failure because the culture of iBankCoin was diluted by know-nothing fucktards, mostly interested in self promotion. After posting my request for formal Twitter resumes, I’ve received dozens of emails from people interested in voicing their opinions.

This is good news from a finance blogging viewpoint, as some believe Twitter has all but eliminated the need for blogs. The truth is, if you’re only on Twitter, you’re a nomad without a home. iBC can offer a homebase for you, one that is without agenda, aside from the completion of the Orbital Space Cannon (OSC), designed wholly for offensive purposes only. To my point, I offer zero promises or monetary reward for joining our ranks. Ad dollars do not support the site and I’d be a ridiculous person to offer money to people who’ve yet to prove themselves valuable to our organization.

Where we’re going with this?

Sky is the limit. iBankCoin has a powerful voice in finance, with over 65 million page views since inception. If you differentiate yourself from the pack, I will assuredly invite you to become a “tabbed blogger.” With it, eventually, may or may not lead to monetary gain. I’ve netted millions in profits from the site, since inception, self funded, totally bootstrapped, and without the hawk eyes of vulture capitalists peering over my shoulder.

That being said, if you’re interested in joining our platform and offering content, whenever it suits you, email me at [email protected].

I am likely to select just 5 people to beta test the program, then expand from there. Ideally, you will bring something to the table, in the form of a Twitter or StockTwits following. If not, I’d like proof that you actually know english.

Regards,

Le Fly

This market has a certain finality to it. You can sense the storm brewing, the indescribable calamity to come. Earnings short fall are swiftly met with decapitation. Entire sectors are dropped into large vats of grease, then lit aflame. The small piker investor is tossed out into the winter winds, without clothes or weapon, then told to hunt.

News flash for all of you: if you aren’t investing in your business, staying informed by reading the missives of persons of superior intellect, you’re already behind the curve. I implore you, for the sake of your children and your children’s children, join the league of top hatted gentlemen inside the grande halls of Exodus and get an edge.

Stocks careened lower, despite what the indices said. I shed all of the gains made yesterday and I am now expecting the very worst to close out the week. The respite was had, and enjoyed. I expect chop from here until January 1st. After the New Year, I expect the market to drop 10% in January, fucking every single person who bought long into what they thought would be “The January Effect.”

X-mas has been canceled.

Chanukah has been canceled.

Fucking Kwanza never happened.

Enjoy the rest of your miserable days.

Thank you for your interest in the new ibc peanut gallery. Your applications will be thoroughly examined by the board of directors and we will conduct thorough backround checks, even visit you while you sleep to rifle through your personal belongings to see if you’re a good match.

I see the market is down just a little bit. But, once again, there is an indescribable evil in this tape, one that I haven’t seen in some time. Naturally, I had foreseen such an event and raised some cash, made COST my largest holding. But even I can’t escape the horrors of this grinder. With positions in SHAK, TWTR and XON, I am not enjoying today’s tape.

A lot of people compare today to 1998. That’s great. The only problem with 1998, for those who traded it, is that it sucked. I lost my first stockbroker job in ’98, being an early investor in internet stocks. No one liked internet stocks back then and I got hammered into pieces. I wrote about my life story in three parts, here.

The Fed is most likely interested in bankrupting some bad actors with their rate hikes. I see no other reason why they’d be so foolish as to tighten now, during the most fucked up part of this little recovery we find ourselves in. Tread carefully and remember that 1998 was not as cool as the charts said they were. It was 1999 that kicked ass, made short sellers regret the day their idiot Fathers took Mom to the movies.

We’e bringing the Peanut Gallery back. For those unfamiliar, it was a blogging platform on iBC that had dozens of independent writers contributing and fucking up the site. This time around, you’re gonna need my approval to be accepted into this league of gentlemen.

If interested in writing for us, email me at Flybroker@gmail.
Don’t forget to tell me your twitter handle, for we will not accept applicants who do not have a fucking twitter handle, God damn it.

In light of the potential PFE for AGN deal, I like pharmaceuticals stocks. I do not, however, like phase 1 biotech gambles. My top pick here is JAZZ, a company that will earn $10 this year and is treated like the fat lady at the end of the bar.

Don’t sleep on JAZZ (double entendre!). They specialize in narcolepsy treatment.

Yesterday’s Fed statement personified fuckery. I am no longer going to name call them as “stupid” or “morons”, for that gives them an easy way out of the nonsensical bullshit they perpetuate. The people at the Fed are the brightest and deliberate in their actions. It’s obvious to me they are trying to do something, just like Greenspan was trying to do something via all of them rate hikes in 2006-2007.

We may need to beware of the Fed.

JP Morgan on Fed statement:

What was to be a somewhat sleepy, noncommittal FOMC statement turned out to be a bit more interesting and, on balance, more hawkish. If nothing else, it reminded markets that there still is a risk of a Fed that starts its rate hiking in December….While remaining noncommittal (as it must), the Fed has introduced language to more strongly emphasize its long-held view that 1) it is data dependent and 2) every meeting is live for a potential rate hike (in this case: December). Not surprisingly, markets are taking notice.

Oil and gold are getting poleaxed this morning, off by 1.5%. The market is starting to worry about a December rate hike, because, umm, we need it so badly.

Global luxury goods sales will register its worst year since Lehman, growing less than 3%. The big hurt is coming from China, who represents more than 30% of global luxury goods sales. It’s obvious to everyone that the economies of the world are struggling. As to why the Fed believes this tepid economy deserves tightening, I have no fucking idea.

Once rates go up, weak companies will bankrupt amidst tighter credit. Maybe that’s what the Fed is trying to do: wash away the weak so that the strong might flourish.

Either way, prepare for some volatility and extreme fuckery.

Bloomberg is out with a late night, exclusive article, talking shit about VRX, giving Bill Ackman nightmares. Don’t you know he barely sleeps after all of the grief that fucker Ron Johnson gave him after the JCP fiasco? Last thing he needs is a $3 billion position turn into fairy dust, a la Enron, the Canadian pharma version.

Actually, the documents BBG secured are pretty damning, painting a fairly vivid picture of a boiler room type operation at VRX. For the record, I would expect nothing less, being that it’s domiciled in the traitorous soil where loyalists took root and plotted to burn down our fucking whited house, all for God and Country of course.

Philidor Rx Services LLC, which fills prescriptions for Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc., instructed employees to submit claims under different pharmacy identification numbers if an insurer rejected Philidor’s claim — to essentially shop around for one that would be accepted.

Employees were to first submit paperwork with Philidor’s national provider identifier, or NPI, and if that didn’t work were to then try with the NPIs of partner pharmacies, according to a Philidor training manual. “We have a couple of different ‘back door’ approaches to receive payment from the insurance company,” said the manual, dated October 2014.

“You will run across several insurances that we are not contracted with,” according to the document, which was obtained by Bloomberg News. In that case, “submit the NPI for our partner in California, West Wilshire Pharmacy,” the manual said. “There is a good chance they are contracted.” If that was denied, the next step was to “add the Cambria Central Fill insurance and run that as the primary,” apparently referring to a pharmacy in Philadelphia. “They should then get a paid claim and then Cambria, another one of our partners, will reimburse us.”

The document’s guidance on NPIs was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Valeant’s relationship with Philidor is at the heart of questions being raised by prosecutors, lawmakers and investors about the drugmaker’s operations and practices. Laval, Quebec-based Valeant has lost almost $10 billion in market value since a Wall Street short-seller on Oct. 21 suggested the company was using Philidor to pump up retail sales and engage in Enron-style accounting tactics. Valeant has denied the allegations.

Ron Hutcheson, a spokesman for Philidor, said the pharmacy is “the patient’s advocate in seeking to ensure that they receive the medication that was prescribed by their doctor at the lowest possible cost to them. This includes following up with insurance companies on behalf of patients.”

Calls placed after regular business hours to Valeant and West Wilshire in Los Angeles weren’t immediately answered. At Cambria Pharmacies, Stephen Bailkin, a manager, said, “I can’t imagine why anyone would be using my NPI number.” He declined to answer questions about Philidor and its relationship with Cambria.

I expect the stock to come under pressure tomorrow. Bill “Montauk” Ackman has his work cut out for him during his 10/30 morning presentation to defend these rascals.

The WSJ is reporting that Pfizer is in discussions to acquire AGN, which, if permitted, would catapult PFE to the 6th largest company in America by market cap.

The process is at an early stage and may not lead to an agreement, the Journal said. Pfizer has a market capitalization of about $219 billion and Allergan has a market value of about $113 billion. Joan Campion, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, said the company doesn’t comment on speculation, while Mark Marmur at Allergan didn’t comment.

A deal of this size is bound to have ripple effects, as the biotech industry reels from one heck of a fucked up tape. Perhaps this is the jolt needed to get the animal spirits going again. One thing is for certain, if this merger passes, PFE will be a force to be reckoned with.

Inside of Exodus, there is a fantastic tool that permits users to profile the market based on fundamentals. I know, for you lazy clam shucking chart chompers, the word fundamentals beckons the days when you had to read, something disdainful to you. While this market is promoted by and pursued by chart licking illiterates, some of us still care about what these companies actually do.

To my point.

I ran screens to find a criteria that has produced the top performing stocks over the past month. The higher I went in market cap, the greater the returns. We already knew that, by simply witnessing the lack of muscle in the Russell. Then I tweaked the gross margins and found that too high was no good, the same for too low. They needed to be right in the middle, at 40%.

Price sales under 20.

PE over 25

Earnings growth over 50%. This was a huge game changer in the returns had over the past month, which paints a market that truly appreciates earnings.

Free cash flow over 500 million.

Now, individually, each screen produced dozens, if not hundreds of different stocks. But if you combined all of the criteria mentioned above, just one stock is produced.

BABA

Odd no?

Loosening the Mussolini type reigns on this screen, here are some additional ideas, based upon scientific fact, not conjecture or wanton opinion produced out of ignorance.

To put this into perspective, the median return for all stocks over the past month is 7.1%. The screen above produced a return double that. There will be outliers, like the fucking liars at GPRO, swindled by parasitic VCs, mountebanks, who rape and pillage the average Joe on a regular basis through a dizzying panorama of tommyrot IPOS. You’d be mindful to recuse yourselves from the litter of IPOs that is fanned out across the market, like shit in a catapult, by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and others. Instead, why not focus on what’s been working?

If I am but one thing, I am a river to my people.

It personifies risk. As a company, Twitter is dysfunctional and stupid and wrong. Their leader gives zero fucks about it and is busy with his real company Square. He cares so little about TWTR that he just gave away 1/3rd of his entire stake, to disgruntled employees.

So if all of these things are true, why was TWTR the most important stock in the market today?

For one, it’s the most talked about, most visible amongst bulls and bears alike. Also, it represents the American brand of craziness that all of you have grown to mock and hate. And, lastly, it represents risk.

In the good confines of Exodus, TNA was flagged OVERSOLD yesterday. Look at her run today. The bounce we are getting today is more than just Apple. It included resurrecting the likes of Twitter from the dead, snatching it from its coffin, applying electricity to its body. At first it twitched and kicked violently, breaking its coffin and making a big fuss about the dirt around it. But, not before long, the mad scientist named Dr. Benjamin Bernanke, from the corner office at Citadel, brought life into the icy veins of Twitter and redubbed him FRANKEN-TWITTER (by now, FRANKEN-TWITTER was rampaging through Beartown, fucking shit up), whilst exclaiming “Bitch is a alive, it’s alive” in between marijuana induced coughs.

TWTR is my 3rd largest position as of the close and I have no idea where that last paragraph came from.

Realizing all of you have done nothing but bank “fuck you money” this year, I wanted to offer an alternative view of this situation. I believe this market to be hell on earth, a brand of evil not seen since the middle ages.  Similar to ancient torture devices, this tape has designs to “purify” its inhabitants and offer them up to the Lord in sacrifice.

Look over the landscape and you will see mangled automobiles, blown out buildings with body parts festooned on them. Those who’ve survived are shell-shocked, numb to the world around them. For avocation, they play russian roulette and blog all day long about how the devil is literally inside of the NYSE.

This message will reach someone, somewhere, who’s brand new to the market, punk rookie, uninitiated bozo the clown. He will scoff at my prose and chalk it up to “old man at the market” syndrome, whatever the fuck that is.

I missed out on massive SLCA gains; but made gains elsewhere. While it’s true, Exodus did flag oversold yesterday and I was 90% long heading into today’s tape, I have nothing but sheer disdain for everything this market represents, with its morbid predilections for pain and misery, thrusted upon the good folks of the United Steaks,