I am a novice farmer, a pseudo intellectual when it comes to things pertaining to the land, so correct me if I’m wrong on any of these items — FarmerFAGS.
Shares of MOS are higher by 23% the past mo and the whole sector is doing well, alongside natural gas. Gas prices in Europe are at new highs and our prices are the highest since 2014. All of this is happening whilst the market gets crushed, so the coverage of these two items have gone mostly unnoticed.
Apparently, natural gas is used in the production of ammonia. It is used as a source of hydrogen. I don’t know if this is a chicken vs egg deal. All I know is prices are going higher and the earnings at MOS were good and getting better.
The share price is on a tear too.
Spot prices for fertilizers, through the roof.
Here are some random notes I picked up while doing some digging.
Urea prices are higher due to increased Indian demand and also because of Iranian sanctions. Indian is no longer accepting supply from Iran — a major supplier of urea.
Production costs in Europe, due to high gas prices and limited Chinese exports have decreased supply.
This is an industry that seems to be insulated from the market environs. Now you know.
Stocks that I’m interested in now are MOS, IPI, UAN, NTR, SWN and NGS.
You can always expect this sort of news to happen when markets get bad. This is a very important news item so pay attention.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Vice Premier Liu He have reportedly resumed discussions about a possible deal that would ease trade tensions.
Mnuchin and He spoke via phone on Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The US is demanding that China put forth an offer before negotiations on a trade deal can begin, while China would like discussion to begin before making a formal proposal.
Trump is an ego-maniac. He will not permit his big beautiful stock market to be sullied. He will ensure a trade deal is worked out with China. That being said, we need to see if this actually moves the needle. At some point, there will be diminishing returns on US-China trade talks and we might even trade lower on the news. We cannot truly go into a bear market without a China trade deal done and the Fed removing themselves from this storyline. Now if we go lower in spite of those two things happening, then we have a problem.
Markets slid by 600. If you’re still of the frame of mind that this cannot be a bear market, then you’re a delusional permanent-bull idiot. I don’t care how smart you think you are, listen to me — you’re a god damned idiot.
What to do?
RAISE CASH.
What should you do?
BUY TREASURIES.
What should you do?
Stop believing the hype. This market is literally built on a house of cards. It can go much lower.
That being said, lower markets force the Fed to stop raising rates and Trump to broker a deal with China. If we fell after those two things happened, then we’re really in for a harrowing decline.
How far can we fall?
Another 20% from today’s closing price.
Into the bell, I remain long SOXL, for a trade — TMF, a few stocks, and 70% cash. I am supremely positioned to buy the blood. That’s what I do and who I am.
I anticipated this retesting of the lows, which we’re doing now. I was 70% cash heading into today, long LABD and TMF.
What were you doing — fuckhead? I bet you were long GE.
That’s who I am, and you’re nothing.
Good Father?
Fuck you, go home and play with your kids.
I am also long TLRY, which is spiking like a motherfucker now — because America has a love affair with drugs.
My only errors are staying long DOCU and DBX. But I had to be long something, otherwise I’d have no exposure to the upside. I also bought SOXL this morning, hoping for a bounce — but not depending on it. Don’t get it twisted, young man; I depend on nothing.
Long term, we’ll all be dead. In the interim, markets are behaving in a manner that looks and feels like a bear market. Sure, things can change. But right now we have to trade the market in front of us, not the one we hope to have.
You cannot repeat the past. We are but shadows on the wall, haunting refrains in the narrative of man. Make your time here count for something. Get off your asses and protect yourselves from the doom that is fast approaching.
Larry Culp, the CEO of GE, gave a calm and measured interview with CNBC’s David Faber this morning, the exact demeanor that got GE in this mess in the first place. This is a company built by Jack and destroyed by Jeff. Their acquisitions and asset sales have been horrendously ruinous throughout the years. And all of those chickens are coming home to roost now, with an underfunded pension of $31 billion and debt in excess of $115b.
GE has now entered the negative feedback loop. It’s an auto-catalyst that perpetuates itself until it’s gone. I’ve seen this countless times before and it almost always ends bad. GE must do something bold and quickly, else we’ll start to see credit agencies downgrade their debt, their lines of credit withdrawn, and the company forced into bankruptcy.
Lots of fucked up cross currents today, especially with continued dollar strength. This tape is starting to look increasingly bearish and it has me thinking bear market, which is why I did the opposite and went long triple upside semis.
I sold my LABD for a ~9% gain. That I bought on Friday. Replacing it, I stepped in and bought SOXL — because why not? It’s a 5% position and I’m 70% cash. The market looks poisonous and I do not feel okay with keeping a triple inverse ETFs on a massive gap lower.
I’m looking for a little mean reversion here. This isn’t a high confidence trade, however. Just spit balling it.
My only other defensive stock is TMF — triple long bonds.
Other website operators will thank their audiences for making their website popular and profitable. While I did think about doing that for a moment or two, ultimately, I decided against it.
Back in the ancient days when iBC was founded, the pre-twitter days of 2007, the internet was a wild place. There were scores of finance blogs and men of ill repute taking to the web in order to run their schemes. Nowadays, those people are on Stocktwits and Twitter, busy getting themselves banned. But back then, the finance realm was festooned by hucksters, men pretending to be stock market sages.
I, on the other hand, told the world to ‘fuck itself’ and was immediately accepted into the bosom of traders. Widely read, but never linked to or talked about in public, iBankCoin quickly became an underground channel for actual finance talk, filled with smoky rooms and men puffing furiously on their pipes, telling others to ‘fuck off’ and to ‘die in a fire’ whenever trades went wrong.
I created this environment here and very few original readers remain in these distinguished halls, mostly because of ADD and the proclivity of man to blow themselves up in trades gone wrong. Writers have come and gone, only Raul and Ragin Cajun remain from the dozens of writers employed by the site. We’ve had numerous premium services launched from the site, all with the purpose to help others, in a most charitable way. Entertainment has always been at the forefront of the site’s mission — because life is tedious and trading is hard. I’ve always erred on the side of invectiveness because the solitude of success and failure is boring and who’s really keeping track after all? I’ve never claimed to be a guru — because that is something to be determined by others. I can only claim to be a Blog Father and someone who is able to communicate well with others, a master at many things, a serial over-achiever, genius extraordinaire.
Thanking you for these things, frankly, would be sycophantic and just plain wrong. To this end, I thank myself for pushing thru the weeds and chopping down the brush to finally view the promise land of milk and honey. It has taken me over a decade to realize what my true calling was and what I should be to the people reading iBankCoin. A trader and masterful word-smith — yes. I am all of those things, and much much more. I like to view myself as a modern day prophet, a man sent down from a distant galaxy to slap his readers in the face with scalding hot slices of pizza — to teach others the way of the lion and to avoid being eaten like the zebra. This might sound caustic to some of you — but I am a benevolent slapper of faces — always meant with good intentions and a strong willed moral compass.
With that said, I now present to you entertainment. The video that ushered in iBankCoin into the lexicon of top tiered finance websites, a dark and swiftly moving pirate vessel firing into the faces of all of the absolute fuckheads who get in our way.
Congratulations to you for finding me online. Cheers.
A key supplier to Apple just warned in a fairly big way and that caused AAPL to drop by 2% and Nasdaq futures by 20.
Lumentum lowers Q2 guidance “We recently received a request from one of our largest Industrial and Consumer customers for laser diodes for 3D sensing to materially reduce shipments to them during our fiscal second quarter for previously placed orders that were originally scheduled for delivery during the quarter.”
Lumentum lowers Q2 EPS to $1.15-1.34 vs $1.67 S&P Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; revs to $335-355 mln vs $420.47 mln S&P Capital IQ Consensus Estimate
LITE makes 3-D sensing lasers for Apple’s facial ID nonsense. Perhaps Apple is getting rid of that asshole feature, or maybe sales are languishing. Either way, LITE is going to get lit the fuck up when it un-halts itself.
In about a week or two, I’ll launch my most aggressive and detailed premium service to date. We’ve done boot camps and trading services before — but this new service, The Capstone Programme, is designed to be custom tailored to the needs of the individual.
My anonymity has always been important. I enjoy to be some mysterious fellow in the darkest corners of an estate castle talking to the plebs about things they understand, only on a rudimentary level. But I’m getting older and my desire to impact the lives of others has increased and I want to start something truly great, and valuable, transferring whatever makes me tick to others in a personal way.
The Capstone Programme — an aspirational attempt at coaching, mentoring, educating traders and investors about markets, trends, and the things that make the world go round. You’ll have my time for exactly 1 hr, for a small fee, and we’ll try to straighten you out.
Here are the topics I intend to cover. If you have requests, let me know. This is a limited member service, since I only have 5 hours per day to do live calls. When this launches, I suggest you lock in fast and good — for they will go fast. “The Fly’s” time is extremely valuable and is worth many trillions of dollars. Lucky for you, you’re reading this now.
My topics, thus far.
Identifying trends
Intra-day moves
Follow through
When to sell/buy
Averaging down vs up
Contrarian bets
Structuring portfolios, long/short term
Setting goals
Conference calls
What to look for in earnings reports
Calling up IR
Charts, price memory, algos
Value investing/value traps
Multiple expansion vs contraction
Economic cycle
Bonds/equities — when to buy
Dividend stocks
Quantitative models
Rotation
Cash is a position
Playing earnings/earnings misses
Catalyst driven trades
Executing trades/ limits vs market orders — pre-makret, after hours
Defensive stocks
ETFs
China
Retail landscape
Mega Caps/FAANG
GARP
Options/Futures
Technical vs fundamental analysis
Fads/Euphoria
Dystopian landscape
Managing moods/healthy habits
Shorting stocks
SHARPE
Retirement accounts
Analyst upgrades/downgrades
Trading around economic news
The Fed
Inflation/deflation
Day trading/swing trading
Hot sectors and why
Market breadth and why it matters
Online resources — information
What is the hardest thing for a faux confident trader to do? By faux, I mean a person who pretends to have high esteem, but always is in need of reassurance — either by flaunting his success or by surrounding himself with sycophantic morons who idle themselves by showering praise unto someone else.
The hardest thing for that person to do is admit being wrong. We all go through periods of low confidence and most of us were raised by fucked up families, into circumstances that created an air of insecurity, whether it by via lack of prosperity, education, or malevolent parents. With time and a bit of maturity, some of you will escape the yolk of this personality disorder and live your lives freely and without feeling less than others.
I mention these uncomfortable traits because it’s part and parcel of being a better trader. When times are good, everyone is a genius. But it’s markets like this one that separate the crop from the chaff — spiraling markets without decency or regard for decorum. It wants to ruin you — because it hates what you represent.
Heading into next week’s trade, be mindful of two distinct possibilities.
1. Market bottoms and soars heading into Turkey Day.
2. Market does the impossible and plummets into Turkey Day.
Anything is possible. Your positions might get ravaged and your accounts zeroed out. If you’re not careful, this could be the last week you’ll ever trade stocks again.
What I’m trying to say, in a very long winded and round about way, is detach yourselves from your bias and the stocks that you own and admit to being wrong. The only way to do this systematically is by setting rules for yourself. Stop losses at -5% and -10%. During periods of flux, minimum cash balances of 30-50% and so on and so forth. No matter how great you think a stock is and what its prospects are, do not place more than 15% of your account in it.
These rules sound rote to many professional traders who are reading this — but truthfully, the majority of the readers of this here site are new. Doing live demos with many of our Exodus members, I’ve come to learn that many have only been reading me for a few months. One gent never even read the blog.
Out with the old and in with the new — the circle of life and the everlasting struggle for dominance continues — even within the confines of this treasured space on the internets.
