Mr. Ackman Would Like to Exact Revenge Now

I’m long two William A. Ackman stocks, and rooting for his diabolical revenge plot to unfold.

Shares of VRX are steamrolling higher today, inspite of a bad market.

The other stock is PAH. But in order for Mr. Ackman, as he’s properly referred to at his manor, shares of VRX must surge so fast, so highly, it will initiste heart attacks in the persons involved in the whole short selling, smear, campaign.

As an aside, shares of SHAK are barreling higher too, making today an all important day for yours truly. It’s especially good when seeing the lot of you strewn out across the lawn, getting mowed down by the blades of your stocks.

As a double aside, Jeff Macke will be joining our ranks soon, video blogging about retail and how fucked it is now.

DEVELOPING…

This is my least enjoyable year in more than a decade trading. Despite being up 15 some odd percent, I hated 2015, even more than my big drawdown year of 2014.

For more than 6 month’s, I’ve labored in this market, dodging bullets and absorbing knife wounds to the stomach, all for nothing. I made all of my gains before May, and then have watched the market morph into a FANG fest, where only a handful of stocks went higher and where my holdings never seem to get a break.

Granted, I am grateful for not getting David Einhorn’d this year and life could be worse; but it’s not fun managing money right now.

I’ll tell you what is fun: advertising on Twitter can becoming a phenom in places like Mongolia and Turkey.

For the first time ever, iBankCoin is beginning to advertise on both Facebook and Twitter, just to expand our tentacles. Thus far, our FB experience was no different from tossing bags of money into flaming barrels of garbage. Twitter, on the othe hand, netted tanglible results, but were skewed by the fact that foreign bot accounts plague the ecosystem.

Before I screened my target audience, dumb shits from all over the globe started to follow me, in response to my ad campaign.

Here I am rambling about some shit that 99.5% of you couldn’t care less about. Geez.

Rule #1 when blogging: talk about what the people want to hear, not what you want to write about.

With that in mind, FCX popped out of nowhere, as did my PAH position. This is the time of year, when volume thins out, big hedge funds push stocks around, in an effort to salvage their pathetic year’s and ingratiate themselves with monstrous sized paychecks.

God bless America.

Apparently, Shkreli livestreams his entire life. I’m not particularly sure how many other biotech CEOs partake in such depravities, such as demonstrating World of Warcraft skills or hoverboarding about the office; but Martin thinks it’s a good idea.

Last night the discussion on his livestream Youtube channel delved into stocks, as he took requests from viewers.

Someone mentioned WGBS and Martin had this to say.

“Could be an ok investment…Definitely not bad.. Definitely not bad… Yeah I wonder if this WaferGen is not so bad.”

On that news, this $12 mill market cap piece of offal is higher by 26% this morning, on nearly 4 million shares.

I guarantee this ends badly, 100%.

The sages over at StockTwits are all over this.

Are you all this stupid, or simply feigning to be idiots?

Bad news for you Fang bangers out there, those long FB, AAPL, NFLX and GOOG: Jefferies sees breadth expanding and doesn’t see a reason to remain secluded in just 4 stinking stocks. They believe, unlike Morgan Stanley, stocks might just rally, beyond a handful of names.

Year-to-date, Facebook is up 35 percent, Amazon 116 percent, Netflix 157 percent, and Google’s Alphabet has jumped 43 percent. This means that the FANG group has been carrying the S&P 500 for much of the year, with the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index, which strips out the effect of large market capitalizations, in negative territory for the year.

A rather important question for investors looking ahead to 2016 is thus whether or not the run in all-powerful FANG stocks will continue. Analysts over at Jefferies are skeptical.

Chief Global Equity Strategist Sean Darby and his team figure there are three extra questions that can help explain the FANG group’s recent upwards moves and answer the question of whether or not the stunning run will continue into next year.
First, how much of this surge is simply due to investors avoiding other areas of the market?

“With the S&P likely to experience a negative earnings year in 2015, there has been a fund shift to ‘growth’ through the year, just as there has been a shift out of the U.S. into other markets,” Darby says. The returns in the S&P 500 since May might be partially explain by this point. As Dana Lyons, partner at J. Lyons Fund Management put it in a blog post late last week; “The median U.S. stock … hit its high for the year in May and is actually down nearly 7 percent [as of Nov. 25].” Since May, all of the FANG stocks are up at least 30 percent.

The research note went on to explain how inflation had bottomed and how chocolate covered rainbows are not only good for you, but tasty too.

I have no real input on this matter. One firm thinks stocks suck and will continue to suck. These maniacs think FANG is old hat and new hats are about to emerge. It’s all horseshit, if you ask me.

This is a traders market.

The good times are over, apparently. Asset managers and self directed investors should prep themselves for the eventuality of moribund returns, according to Morgan Stanley.

A period of unprecedented monetary stimulus in the wake of the global financial crisis helped spur “an unusually benign” trade-off between the risk a portfolio manager is willing to take and excess returns generated.

That is, returns have been higher for a given level of volatility than the previous 20-year average. What’s more, notes Sheets, is that the slope of the 2010-2015 frontier shows that adding more volatile holdings (like stocks) was a better risk-reward proposition than the period from 1990 to 2009.

But Morgan Stanley’s forecasts for returns across asset classes suggest this is all about to change. Investors should prepare for an era of below-average returns, in which moving into riskier holdings won’t juice performance as much as it has in the recent past. On either side of the Atlantic, the 10-year return from a portfolio equally divided between stocks and bonds is not expected to break 4 percent.

After the Morgan Stanley analyst, who wrote this gibberish, finished this report, he, reportedly, soiled himself and then went to polish off his crystal ball.

Unbelievable clownery taking place in Tokyo these days. Last October the Samurai at GPIF decided to double its equity exposure to over 20% of assets, divesting from old boring bonds in the process. Everything was swell, until markets pounded them into dust and absconded with $64 billion of Japanese savings.

The world’s biggest pension fund posted its worst quarterly loss since at least 2008 after a global stock rout in August and September wiped $64 billion off the Japanese asset manager’s investments.

The 135.1 trillion yen ($1.1 trillion) Government Pension Investment Fund lost 5.6 percent last quarter as the value of its holdings declined by 7.9 trillion yen, according to documents released Monday in Tokyo. That’s the biggest percentage drop in comparable data starting from April 2008. The fund lost 8 trillion yen on its domestic and foreign equities and 241 billion yen on overseas debt, while Japanese bonds handed GPIF a 302 billion yen gain.

The loss was GPIF’s first since doubling its allocation to stocks and reducing debt last October, and highlights the risk of sharp short-term losses that come with the fund’s more aggressive investment style. Fund executives have argued that holding more shares and foreign assets is a better approach as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to spur inflation that would erode the purchasing power of bonds.

“Short term market moves lead to gains and losses, but over the 14 years since we started investing, the overall trend is upwards,” Hiroyuki Mitsuishi, a councilor at GPIF, said at a press conference in Tokyo. “Don’t evaluate the results over the short term, as looking over the long term is important.”

It really was a bad quarter, truth be told. I’m not sold on the idea that pension funds should be so aggressive, unless of course it’s worth betting it all on black. I’m a fan of that approach. Go big or go home. In this case, unfortunately, the kamikazi dive bombers at GPIF went home with a big fat zero, no pun intended.

It’s all fun and games until your book is on fire.

This one goes out to all of you river boat gamblers out there, super-degenerate drug addled alcoholics, who spend their days smoking bacon wrapped cigars and tweeting out their latest acts of genius.

“The Fly” is a man for the people, by the people. Bless his house.

Data provided by Exodus

Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, news out from China, for the entrepreneurial elevator industry, is dire and getting worse by the second.

After peaking at 600,000 units last year, sales in China may drop to about 500,000 next year amid a surplus of apartments and slowdown of people moving to big cities, Otis Elevator Co. President Philippe Delpech, who heads the world’s largest maker of elevators, said in an interview in Tokyo this month. After that, the market in China, where more than two-thirds of elevators are sold, may stabilize, he said.

When will this market recover, you ponder?

“It could be never,” Delpech said. “We will have to adjust the output of the factories to the market. You will have a consolidation in the market and some small companies will disappear.”

WHAT?! Holy shit.

UTX is the only publicly trades elevator company. Otis cowers in the private markets, secretly getting ravaged from a quickly sinking Chinese’d effect.

“It’s like when they built New York up over 20 to 30 years. They delivered more elevators than they will ever deliver again,” Delpech said. “It’s kind of that type of construction.”

They’re trying to spin year over year deceleration in sales as a positive, caveating how onerous online retailers are to brick and mortar and how they should be content with a very small draw down from last year.

Losers think like that.

Sales at U.S. brick-and-mortar stores on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday were down slightly from last year, but the performance was still seen as strong in a holiday shopping season where discounts spread well beyond the weekend and many shoppers moved to the web.

Online sales were up by double digits, according to data released on Saturday.

Data from analytics firm RetailNext showed overall sales for both days fell 1.5 percent on flat customer traffic, while average spending per shopper dropped 1.4 percent.

Preliminary data from ShopperTrak showed sales at stores totaled about $12.1 billion on Thursday and Friday. The company said it is an “estimated decrease from last year” but did not give the percentage decline due to an internal change in the way it calculates data. Last year, it reported sales of $12.29 billion for the same period.

Sepaaretly, online retailers aka Amazon, posted 18% growth for total sales of $4.4 billion. In a twisted world, a -1.4% growth rate is “good”. In the real world, it fucking sucks. The shopping mall is deal. Long live the deflationary vortex of the internet, aka Amazon and Google.

I can’t wait for Cyber-Monday. My wife just told me “it already started.”

Putin’s spokesman is upping the rhetoric today, casting aspersions and chastising the Turks for their “traitorous” behavior.

“Nobody has the right to traitorously shoot down a Russian plane from behind,” Peskov told Russia’s “News on Saturday” TV programme, calling Turkish evidence purporting to show the Russian SU-24 jet had violated Turkish air space “cartoons”.

“The president is mobilised, fully mobilised, mobilised to the extent that circumstances demand,” said Peskov.

“The circumstances are unprecedented. The gauntlet thrown down to Russia is unprecedented. So naturally the reaction is in line with this threat.”

He then added an important note to the dialogue, regarding Edrogan’s interest in ISIS controlled oil, why they buy it from them, and perhaps providing the sane people of the world with a motive for doing so.

Peskov, according to the TASS news agency, also spoke of how Erdogan’s son had a “certain interest” in the oil industry. Putin has said oil from Syrian territory controlled by Islamic State militants is finding its way to Turkey.

NATO should cut Turkey loose from its alliance. But they won’t, since for some reason, our interests are aligned with theirs.

Fuckery.

Update: The Kremlin announces a wide swath of sanctions against the bedlamites in Turkey.

President Vladimir Putin signed a decree imposing a raft of punitive economic sanctions against Turkey on Saturday, underlining the depth of the Kremlin’s anger toward Ankara four days after Turkey shot down a Russian warplane.
The decree, which entered into force immediately, said charter flights from Russia to Turkey would be banned, that tour firms would be told not to sell any holidays there, and that unspecified Turkish imports would be outlawed, and Turkish firms and nationals have their economic activities halted or curbed.