18 years in Wall Street, left after finding out it was all horseshit. Founder/ Master and Commander: iBankCoin, finance news and commentary from the future.
Just when I thought Bill Ackman’s fortune had turned for the better, this shit happens. Shares of VRX are down a staggering 17% today, putting Bill’s intra-day losses on the idiot Candadian company at over $300 million.
He is losing more than $20 million per point.
As a result, people are just gunning at his positions, taking down PAH and giving rise to HLF. Truly, Bill Ackman is having a very, very bad day.
I don’t even know what the news is anymore for VRX. The stock is stuck in the biggest fag box I’ve ever seen. As such, the entire biotech sector is being shredded. ENDP is off more than 12% because people see them as a mini VRX. There is immense pain being widely distributed in the sector today and it bodes very poorly for the market, on the whole.
Regarding VRX, providing it’s not a fraud and Bill gets the biblical revenge he so desperately seeks, valuation is compelling.
It’s never easy to jump in front of a moving train. I rarely, if ever, buy blood like this. It’s too scary. But these are the type of flush out moves that, potentionally, put in bottoms. I know, the whole thing is a scam.
Remembe when BP was going to zero because the oil spill was uncontrollable and it was going to destroy the world? Or when Fukushima threated to disintegrate Japan and when MRK was going to zero because their meds caused insane heart attacks?
Thanks to a blowout quarter, powered by its killer mobile strategy, today’s gains have pushed the social giant right behind Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, ahead of AMZN and GE, to become the 6th largest company in the United States, by market cap.
For the quarter, Facebook accounted for 17.4% of global traffic. It is, essentially, a must own stock if you want to profit from the internet. The one thing to look forward to with FB is the fact that they’re blocked in China. With over 350 million internet users, China represents a unique business opportunity for the hoodied masters at Facebook. If, by chance, Zuckerberg can get the ban on Facebook lifted in China, the stock will soar to a gazillion dollars per share.
“You can’t have a mission of connecting the world and leave out the biggest country”, Mark Zuckerberg, Boss Hog, Faced Book.
With AWAY being acquired by Expedia and FB killing it, I think it’s fair to say Social Media stocks are back in play.
Inside Exodus, my social media basket is the best performing mini-index I put together, over the past month, with gains of more than 14%. With recent acquisitions of CTCT, KING and now AWAY, there’s probably more gains to be had (extra steroids).
Friday’s jobs report is most likely the last big market moving event of the year. With Yellen’s recent comments, and that fuckhead Dudley talking greasy daily, odds of a December rate hike are now upwards of 50%. Should the jobs numbers come in better than the expected 180k, things should get dicey, as in your portfolios will be shredded to pieces…maybe.
Expect the market to mark time over the next few days, entering into a state of malaise, as traders position in ahead of the number. If the Fed is really going to hike, dollars go up and oil and gas stocks get hammered. Oil stocks get hammered, not just because UUP is rallying; but because credit, inexorably, will get tighter. The Fed might actually be trying to induce bankruptcies amidst a number of injured sectors, in order to “clear the market.” I know that sounds fucking nuts; but the normal business cycle has been fucked for over 5 years now and maybe Yellen is old and crazy enough to do something bold.
Yields up; bonds down. Regional banks are winners, as well as money center banks. In short, I read that banks stand to make over $7 billion in additional profits, should the yield curve widen, thanks to Fed tightening.
The other headwind is King Dollar.
It’s up almost 20% over the past two years and it’s killing our exporters, making them less competitive and hurting earnings. This, of course, is not a zero sum game and perhaps orchestrated by the Fed and ECB, to help Europe, who was on the verge of dissolving like wet toilet paper in a bowl a few years ago. Since they started QE, everything has improved, including Italian, Spanish GDP, even Greek bonds have risen– in true opera-esque dramatic fashion.
Everything is done with purpose, by our benevolent central’d bankers. Try to read the tea leaves and be careful with your positions heading into Friday.
This is my 11,000 blog, work that has culminated since I had the crazy idea to ignore my million dollar advisory business for talking shit about hedge fund managers and the stock market online, about the internets, almost 8 years ago. The number 1 rule when blogging is to love doing it. Should you find it to be a chore, or it pisses you off because the ad rates are slavery-like, fall back son and become a reader again.
When I started finance blogging in 2007, the game was simple. You blogged and lured people in from the yahoo message boards, then talked shit in your comments section, having a grande old time. Since then, Twitter and Stocktwits were born, effectively stealing away the comments section. Readers found themselves in the indelible position of having to read 140 character or less, casting aside blogs because they were the new newspapers. Like all living species, the blogger had to adapt, so he took to Twitter and StockTwits, built up a small following, and then remanded them back to the blog through links and lures and demands.
Today, Twitter represents almost 30% of our inbound traffic, a site that has been fortunate enough to be operated by a space alien magician (SAM), blessed with over 65 million page views to date. The website layout must be mobile friendly, else you lose viewers. As you can see by our new look and approach, it is geared towards the ADD addled, picture loving, booze hound who enjoys to make fun of Bill Ackman in his spare time.
Web traffic has surged over 50% one month since the redesign. All of the bloggers at iBankCoin have stepped up their game and I logged one my biggest work months ever, with 208 blogs posted. Writing comes very natural to me; but sometimes I get bored from the monotony of finance. My new approach is geared more towards news and information, with some opinion mixed in. Instead of wasting my finger energy on insane missives that would easily get me tossed into a Chinese Burrito prison, I’ve concluded it’s far more interesting for me to give you, the pleb reader, housing tenement living motherfucker, my take on the egregious events that takes place, each and every day.
“The Fly” is omnipresent and shoots cannon balls into your living room sofa.
Thank you for coming to iBC and enduring my mood swings. If you truly appreciate the content that I provide here, tell your idiot friends to follow our corporate Twitter Account and to like our Faced Book page.
Why do I demand these things from you? While it might seem silly to you, and entirely juvenile, idiotic and lame, it is my purpose in life to spread our brand of propaganda as far and wide as humanly possible. All persons of reading age should know about men like Frederick Wilson and William Albert Ackman (sex crazed fiend), so that if they ever came across them in dark alley ways, or in Bill’s case, dungeons; they could avoid them and walk the other way.
“The Fly” is a the truth (here, here–slams cane into ground, tosses a bag of garbage onto his neighbors lawn).
ETSY is especially egregious to me because of how obvious it was that they sucked giant moose balls. Wall street paraded this giant heap of shit on people, through the media and investment banks, drumming up demand for IPO. I recall debating one of the bedlamites from Benzinga on Twitter about the prospects for this crafting giant of cock.
Now that the stock is single digits, perhaps we should revisit who sold on the IPO? Yes, a grande idea. Why not?
I hold nothing against Frederick Wilson, per se. It’s only that he represents something that I find wholly distasteful, the garish flaunting of wealth by a super elite and exclusive group of financiers, powered by nerds with Aspergers, whose rise to power isn’t zero sum. The difference has been made up by a retail investor who’ve been sold, hook, line and sinker, that the social media boom will make them rich.
The social media boom made some people rich; now everyone else provides liquidity for the lucky few, early investors.
Again, don’t buy VC backed IPOs for at least 1 year after IPO.
A lot of bullshit is circulating today, with regards to this earnings season and how it’s the worst since 2009. Oh, really?
So far, about three-quarters of the S&P 500 have reported results, with profits down 3.1 percent on a share-weighted basis, data compiled by Bloomberg shows. This would be the biggest quarterly drop in earnings since the third quarter 2009, and the second straight quarter of profit declines. Earnings growth turned negative for the first time in six years in the second quarter this year.
Negative headlines makes traffic go up, mainly because humans are fucked up that way. The truth about this earnings season is that it’s ordinary. The majority of the earnings decline is from oil and gas stocks, whose earnings numbers plunged over 50% this year over last. Fucking duh.
With 75% of earnings in, more than 72% of stocks in the S&P have beat expectations. Moreover, there is considerable earnings growth in consumer discretionary industries.
I hate all earnings seasons. I can’t recall the last one I enjoyed. Stocks always do better when the facade is placed firmly atop the ugly exterior. People are never happy and rarely pleased, which explains the heart stopping declines when a company misses expectations. No wonder why so many CEOs prefer to stay private.
Right now stocks are selling off, as predicted. SPY and QQQ flagged overbought in Exodus yesterday. I expect this drop to be shallow. We will likely rally towards the ends of this week, then level off again. I am expecting both November and December to be flat months.
Just when you thought the rally monkey was cock out, dancing on the graves of short sellers, Grandma Yellen comes out from the woodwork to talk shit.
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Wednesday that December would be a “live possibility” for a rate hike if the upcoming data are supportive.
“Now no decision has been made on that and, what it will depend on, is the [Federal Open Market Committee’s] assessment at the time. That assessment will be informed by all of the data that we collect between now and then,” she said, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee.
Yellen also said she and the committee expect the economy to grow “at a pace that’s sufficient to generate further improvement in the labor market, and to return inflation to our 2 percent target.”
“If the incoming information supports that expectation, then or statement indicates that December would be a live possibility,” she said.
A rate hike isn’t the worst thing in the world, especially not for banks. With a wider yield curve, banks will make even more money. Those bank exec motherfuckers will be popping champagne corks into the faces of people who got denied mortgage loans in no time at all.
HLF will trade to zero and VRX to $440. But before those two amazing things happen, there will be a short squeeze, of epic and monumental proportions, in another Ackman fav: PAH.
Like all things in life, Mr. Ackman ebbs and flows. Last year he was flowing, this year, not so much.
Yesterday, in the afternoon, after a ham sandwich with mustard, noshing on a few chips, I made the decision to acquire Bill Ackman, and his considerable resources, for about $12.30. I stand before you today, at a profit from yesterday’s foray into the Pershing Square boardroom, and announce to you, here, on iBankCoin, that I’ve redoubled my investment in Bill, at a price no more than $12.90 for his PAH investment.
With today’s pledge of $12.90, I am supporting William Albert Ackman and his endeavors to be the next Warren Buffett.
In all seriousness, PAH is now my second largest position.
NOTE: If you’ve ever laughed at one of my articles, you’ll like our Facebook page and forcibly make all of your friends and family do the same. Upon hitting 1,000, I will randomly choose one of you and mail you a box filled with stuff lying around my house.
VC backed crypto-currency, which is video game bux that is either “mined” by computers, solving riddles, or purchased by persons who think it’s a good idea to exchange actual currency backed by central banks for video game bux–because one day homes, cars and stuff at the grocery stores can be purchased with it.
Why will this happen?
Well, because everyone hates central bank shenanigans and fiat currency isn’t real, THAT’S WHY (removes V for Vendetta mask)!
