Wikileaks: John Kerry Used FARC Peace Negotiations to Pressure Ecuador to Stop Assange

Wikileaks just sent out two tweets that should shock me into thinking ‘wow, my government is fucked up for trying to leverage peace negotiations protect Hillary Clinton and her band of bandits from public humiliation’, but I’m not. I’m too much of a cynic to believe anyone does things for selfless, righteous reasons.

Seeing that Ecuador turned off Assange’s internet access, I imagine J. Kerry might want to take a bow and flatulate himself for this huge diplomatic victory.

Unlike western Federal Governments of the world, both investors and corporations are awash in cash. Isn’t that an interesting dichotomy? Have you ever thought about it for a moment, seeing that we’re bedraggled by $20t in debt at a time when cash is freely flowing and hoarded by corporations on a global basis?

Bank of America is out with a note highlighting the fact that investor cash is now at levels not seen since after 9/11, at 5.8%. Smugly, they view this as a buying signal — since people are too stupid to identify risk, apparently. I’ve always loved the thought process behind ‘contrarian signals.’

In other words, you’re basing your entire investment philosophy on the stupidity of the masses. It is condescension, personified.

“This month’s cash levels indicate that investors are bearish, with fears of an EU breakup, a bond crash and Republicans winning the White House jangling nerves,” said Michael Hartnett, the bank’s chief investment strategist.

He furthers…

Elevated cash balances potentially sets the stage for a stock-market rally, according to the Bank of America analysts. “When average cash balance rises above 4.5 percent a contrarian buy signal is generated for equities. When the cash balance falls below 3.5 percent a contrarian sell signal is generated,” writes Hartnett’s team in Tuesday’s report.

On a short term basis, Harnett might be right. After all, November of 2001 was a short term bottom for the market — as it drifted into year end and then rallied hard in early 2002. However, let’s not forget the fact that markets continued to struggle for more than a year afterwards, with the Nasdaq plunging from 2,000 to the 1,200 level before bottoming.

I think people sense something is wrong, evident by the sheer numbers and lunacy of central bank overplanning. Perhaps if they’d stop meddling and let the business cycle live or die on its own merits, people would feel more confident in the legitimacy of the market.

I know I would.

As CB Insights pointed out last week (“Union Square Ventures Is Really F’n Good”), USV was also an early investor in Twitter (NYSE:TWTR), Tumblr (which was sold to Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO)), Lending Club (NYSE:LC), Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA), and Etsy (NASDAQ:ETSY). USV has had a billion dollar exit every year since 2011. Last year, Union Square Ventures led one ranking as the top venture capital fund in the world, and the Twilio exit further cements its status.

Look at their balance sheet statement for the first 9mos compared to last year. Does this look like a healthy business, making up the majority of its gains in interest income schemes? If it weren’t for their money changing abilities to turn gold out of shit, one might surmise this was a shitty business.

The stock is higher in the pre market, but I’m not impressed.

For the quarter, they bought back 7.8m shares at $162 for more than $1.2b. They have 34m shares left in their buyback program, while steadily cutting back on their employee headcount.

For the past 3 months, all of their growth has been in lending.

If you’re buying Goldman here, you’re betting on a company that is using buybacks to boost earnings and wholly dependent on non investment bank growth to fuel their business. They just unveiled their new lending business, dubbed Marcus, so I suppose they’ve seen the future and it has more to do with lending than it does with their core business of investment banking.

It’s too muddled with lots of gray areas. I’d avoid.

The market loves corruption and stagnation. Asian markets ripped higher last night, led by Hang Seng up 1.5%.

This morning it’s all about the MIB — higher by 1.8%.

And of course there are rumblings that the U.K. might need the House of Corrupt Commons vote on BREXIT.

This from bbg

“There’s a very strong argument for the government allowing the approval of a deal reached, but of course it would prefer a vote after Article 50 is triggered,” said Robert Thomas, professor of public law at the University of Manchester. Against the backdrop of a ticking clock, lawmakers would be “pressured to agree” to any deal, he said.

So it’s all very well and good. WTI and gold are edging higher and futures are up 100.

And the Trump supporters are so violent and out of control. The hatred of Trump and his minions has obviously spread, like a cancer, to these urban lads.

In ancient times, Glenn Thrush, Politico’s Chief Political ‘Correspondent,’ would be called a ‘catamite’ for the ruling class. The Praetorian Guard would summon him to pleasure one of Rome’s Senators and then whipped about a pole, then told to go home to his disgusting hovel of a shit house. He is a man of little to zero integrity, living in a world that isn’t his own. He believes that by doing good by those who he adores, it will further his career and maybe become ‘one of them.’ He isn’t one of them. He never will be one of them. Instead, he prostitutes himself over the mantle of degeneracy — always attempting to please the ruling class of socially trendy totalitarians.

He is a cog in the agitprop wheel and has been outed for what he is: a scandalous mountebank, member of the Third Estate, ordinary canaille. Very plain and very boring.

Read.

Fuck with Podesta and Clinton and the DNC all you want. However, if you fuck with Goldman, you get your internet access revoked.

We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 17, 2016

God bless Goldman Ballsachs.

Does anyone care anymore? I sense that this sort of in your face criminality isn’t interesting enough for the average American. We’re more interested when some two bit stock broker gets a tip and trades on it, sending him into gaol for a period of 10 years, than this stuff.

All of these people should be in jail, even placed inside of electric chairs and roasted without a watery cap.

If you could watch just one undercover video regarding the election of 2016, it is this one.

Netflix is higher by 19% in the after-hours, on an earnings beat for the ages. If you recall, I highlighted the idiot nature of Wedbush and the people that work there about a week ago — who made just about the worst call in the history of stocks — suggesting NFLX was to be cut in half.

Here are the headlines, via Briefing.com.

Netflix Q3 Domestic Net Additions 0.370 mln vs 0.30 mln guidance; Q4 guidance is for 1.45 mln, expectations were for ~1.00 mln; Q2 adds was 0.16 mln

Netflix prelim Q3 $0.12 vs $0.05 Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; revs $2.29 bln vs $2.28 bln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate

Netflix sees Q4 $0.13 vs $0.08 Capital IQ Consensus

Netflix Q3 International Net Additions 3.20 mln vs 2.00 mln guidance; For Q4 NFLX expects addition of 3.75 mln, expectations were for ~3.00 mln; Q2 Adds was 1.52 mln

 

In Q3, we added 0.4 million members in the US vs. our forecast of 0.3 million and 3.2 million members internationally vs. our forecast of 2.0 million. Our over-performance against forecast (86.7m total streaming members vs. forecast of 85.5m) was driven primarily by stronger than expected acquisition due to excitement around Netflix original content.

By the end of Q3’16, we had un-grandfathered 75% of the members that are being un-grandfathered this year and the impact has been consistent with our expectations. ASP grew over 10% year-over-year in both the US and international segments (excluding a $35 million F/X impact).
In the international segment, we exceeded our internal projection for net adds as the acquisition impact of our originals was greater than anticipated across many of our markets.We are investing in more content across multiple international markets in Q4 and, as a result, we project international contribution loss to grow moderately to $75 million.

For Q4, we forecast 5.2 million global net adds, with 1.45 million net adds in the US and 3.75 million new members internationally. Our expectation for a moderate year-over-year decline in net adds reflects the completion of un-grandfathering. We are pleased with the results thus far as we expect ASP to grow 12% from Q1’16 to Q4’16. Internationally, the initial demand from our launch in Spain, Portugal and Italy in Q4’15 will also affect our year-over-year net adds comparison.

China- The regulatory environment for foreign digital content services in China has become challenging. We now plan to license content to existing online service providers in China rather than operate our own service in China in the near term. We expect revenue from this licensing will be modest. We still have a long term desire to serve the Chinese people directly, and hope to launch our service in China eventually.

Consequently, we plan on investing more, which will continue to weigh on free cash flow. We expect Q4’16 FCF to be similar to Q3’16 FCF. Over time, we will be able to fund more of our investment in programming through the growth in operating profit and margin already underway. Streaming content obligations at quarter end were $14.4 billion, up $1 billion sequentially.

We finished the quarter with $1.3 billion in cash and equivalents. As we have often done over the past few years, we plan to raise additional debt in the coming weeks. With a debt to total capitalization ratio of about 5%, we remain underleveraged compared both to similar firms and to our view of an efficient capital structure.

The stock is trading at $119 in the after- hours. The 52 week high is $133. Look for the stock to squeeze towards and above that high in the days and weeks ahead. There are a lot of bears marooned in this stock.

The one caveat here: cash burn is up big, doubling from $250m to over $500m for the quarter. Look for the company to announce a secondary soon. After the price drops from the offering, get back in for the lift higher.