The Rally Continues; Dow Adds Another 44

The big show stopper was copper, up 1.5% to 4 month highs. Gold was also impressively higher, as well as bonds. The market bid up non risk assets, while bidding up the risky ones too.

We are now having our cake and eating it too.

Retail is being sucked back into the market, like a fucking black hole with all of its insidious trimmings. Nevertheless, as I’ve been saying, this is the season to rally, so we might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

You do realize the market is barely down for the year now and many stocks are firmly in the black, yes? All of that panic was for naught, as the Federal Reserve readies to hone in on your portfolios in the name of inflation.

It just goes to show you what the Canadian gov’t thinks of one of their leading mining industries. It’s equal to Detroit saying they no longer like cars.

The sale of 21,851 ounces of the gold coins took place in February, the Finance Department said Thursday from Ottawa in a disclosure of the government’s official international reserves. A footnote in the report noted the sale and said that the government still has 77 ounces of the precious metal. The official international reserves round asset valuations to the nearest $1 million, so the value of the remaining gold was set at zero, department spokesman David Barnabe said by e-mail.

The Canadian gov’t are run by shameful people.

Coming from a former stock junky, trust me when I say selling rips is easier said than done. Everyone is waiting for the dot com bubble redux. I don’t give a shit who you are or what type of investor you’re pretending to be. Everyone misses the dot com days and we’re all just glumly waiting around for the golden days to return.

Memories of runaway markets have crushed more portfolios than the actual dot com crash. Truth is, this market sucks. It has sucked on enormous elephant dung for the better part of two years.

Stop waiting for glory and accept fate.

As many of you know, I’ve taken a brand new approach to this market, albeit something I’ve been working on and developing with the Exodus algorithms since 2008.

I endeavor to rule over the market, not the other way around. I found my life in trading was becoming arduous and burdensome. I was controlled by news and events, afraid of fuckery, largess, which seemed to be happening on a regular basis. All that has changed and I’m keenly focused on building out the software suite to even greater lengths and capabilities, while sticking with mean reversion positioning, using the very best oversold signals on the market today, hands down.

The net result, thus far, aside from ditching the entire drawdown and making a small sum this year, is a vast improvement in the quality of my life.

Markets look soft early going. Trading or not, buying momo, after extended runs, has been a suckers bet. Don’t rest on sentiment and fading glory days as the rationale behind your trades.

Fade the rips. They’re bullshit.

The echo is, by far, my favorite electronic device. It makes Apple’s Siri look and sound retarded. The product is brilliant and the closest thing to having Iron Man’s Jarvis in your house.

They’ve launched two new versions.

Two new versions were unveiled Thursday. The $90 Echo Dot, which looks like a hockey puck, lets customers hook up their own speakers to access Amazon’s online services. Amazon Tap, which sells for $130, is a portable battery-powered version of the Echo, which debuted in 2014 as an intelligent home assistant that can respond to utterances such as “re-order paper towels,” “play Kanye” and “turn on the lights.”

My most recent experience with the echo was listening to Winston Churchill’s book, via audible, about the Second World War. It was narrated by the brilliant Michael Jayston, spanning in 6 parts. Aside from being a great leader, Winston was a master with the pen. Superb prose.

By the way, who the fuck is writing headlines for NBC news?

They might as well title it “ROMNEY TO CUT OFF TRUMP’S COCK” and tell America how they really feel about him.

Look, the GOP establishment hates Trump more than the democrats. They will do anything in their power to keep the border porous and fucked up trade deals in place, for the benefit of the oligarchy aka America’s aristocracy.

Today they are peddling out Mitt Romney to call Trump and phony (ooh, how below the belt). Tomorrow they’ll bring out one of his former wives to promote scandal.

Trump has preempted Mitt’s scripted marching orders and has taken to the Twitter machine to show his disdain.

Obama has defeated the American oil industry, for the benefit of Saudi Arabia and OPEC. Investment has gotten so bad here, the rig count is about to dive under 500, or 1948 levels–when we were doing absolutely nothing at all. After that, we will soon approach civil fucking war rig count levels.

Oil and gas companies have cut so much spending amid the biggest price crash in a generation that there are only 502 drilling rigs still active in the country, according to Baker Hughes Inc. In the next few weeks, that could fall below 488, the lowest level in records dating back to 1948, according to Paul Hornsell, head of commodities research for Standard Chartered Bank.

“While there is no consistent series for drilling activity before 1948, we think it likely that to find a lower level of activity would require going back to the 1860s, the early part of the Pennsylvania oil boom,” Hornsell said in a research note today.

Long live the windmill. Wind baby, wind.

This story will slowly begin to pick up steam until they’re due to negotiate terms this summer, when Greece will need more money. Until then, as the migration of people from war torn areas of the Middle East strangle Greece to death, you will hear a lot of posturing out of Greek officials, emboldened by recent events.

Greek rejected the IMF’s demands for further pension cuts, which have been cut 11 times since the Greek drama began.

“It (the IMF) thinks that the figures don’t add up for us to reach (a primary surplus) of 3.5 percent of GDP in 2018 and says that since you have cut down on everything else, where are you going to find (money) if you don’t lower pensions further?” Tsakalotos told parliament.

Pensions have been cut 11 times since Greece signed its first bailout in 2010 and Athens cannot lower them further, the minister said.

He said the economy last year had performed better than projected under the bailout deal signed up in August. “The average estimate when we were discussing was for GDP growth of -2 percent and now we know it will be between -0.4 and -0.7 percent,” said Tsakalotos.

The IMF is also pushing EU lenders — the European Central Bank, the European Stability Mechanism and the EU Commission — to offer Greece more generous debt relief to make its reform program more sustainable, he said.

If Greece is ever going to leave the euro, 2016 would be ideal…for them at least.

B. Gross, some guy from Janus, said to avoid bank stocks, not so much because of their exposure to deleterious oil balance sheets, but because the negative yield situation that prevails in Europe and Japan renders them without room to grow.

Moreover, he likened them to a utility stock.

“The recent collapse in worldwide bank stock prices can be explained not so much by potential defaults in the energy/commodity complex, as by investor recognition that banks are now not only being more tightly regulated, but that future Return On Equity’s will be much akin to a utility stock.”

Gross warned investors: “Banking/finance seems to be either a screaming sector ready to be bought or a permanently damaged victim of write-offs, tighter regulation and significantly lower future margins. I’ll vote for the latter.”

Gross said investors should not reach for the “tantalizing apple of high yield or the low price/book ratio of bank stocks.” Those prices are where they are because of low/negative interest rates, Gross said.

Additionally, investors should not reach for the seemingly momentum-driven higher prices of German bunds and U.S. Treasuries that negative yields have produced, Gross said.
“A 30-year Treasury at 2.5 percent can wipe out your annual income in one day with a 10 basis point increase,” Gross said.

“The secret in a negative interest rate world that poses extraordinary duration risk for AAA sovereign bonds is to No 1, keep bond maturities short and No 2 borrow at those attractive yields in a mildly levered form that provides a yield and expected return of 5-6 percent.”

Lots of warnings taking place in this article. One of them should’ve said “do not invest with me at Janus because I’m washed up.”

This company is a huge piece of shit and I’m glad it’s crashing through the floor boards this morning. Plus anyway, Ackman has had enough damage inflicted to humble 10,000 ordinary men. I am certain he’s learned the many valuable lessons of humility these past 12 or so months and will sin no more. It’s time for a little revenge trading, of the biblical varietal.

Herbalife admitted to rigging their growth numbers this morning, sort of. They rigged it to the first degree and did so with great fraudulent energy, like any ordinary mountebank. But they’re blaming it on a spread sheet malfunction instead of plain old fraud. You know why of course. The latter sends them all packing towards clown raping prison.

A metric called active new members increased 3.2 percent worldwide in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, not the 16.7 percent cited on a Feb. 25 conference call, the Los Angeles-based company said in a regulatory filing Thursday. U.S. active new members increased 30.7 percent, not the 71 percent mention on the call, Herbalife said. Those were among more than two dozen instances where the company misstated new member statistics, according to the filing. The company relies on independent distributors to sell weight-loss shakes and supplements.

Bear in mind, on the other side of the ledger is old man Icahn, who is long out of his nostril hairs. Ackman, of course, is short to the magnitude of $1 billion.

The price of copper has been quietly edging higher over the past few weeks, after an odious decline.

As such, the all important indicator of global economic vitality presses four month highs.

The most leveraged and best positioned to play this move, should it continue, is Freeport McMoran, ticker FCX.