Serious Question: Can $CMG Recover?

My son loves to eat at Chipotle. He’s a grown man, so I can’t stop him from driving to that denizen of ill repute for lunch — but even he won’t go near the place after the latest norovirus news.

I don’t think there has ever been a case like this before, in corporate history. We’re seeing a great brand tarnished and ruined due to food safety issues and the company is utterly rudderless. They cannot stop it, or even tell us why it’s happening. It’s like an invisible hand is out there, targeting Chipotle, at random restaurants, making people sick. If I was tasked with investigating this, I’d be looking into corporate sabotage.

For us, as consumers and potential shareholders, CMG is toxic.

This latest norovirus breakout has come at the worst possible time. The company just started to turn the corner on revenues and earnings, after two years of hell.

Being the largest non-GMO food chain in America, I’m rooting for them. But can they recover? The last time I visited a Chipotle (last week with my son), the Princeton eatery was COMPLETELY empty, and it was only 5pm. In the past, that store would be brimming with people, with a line stretching outside the store. Now, no one even goes there. Sad!

The market is hitting record highs again — with it comes record low volatility. No one is bothering to hedge their positions via puts anymore. We’re all just out there, naked and stark raving mad, making ravenous amounts of money.

Has there ever been a time when the VIX collapsed like this, giving us a sense of invincibility that one day shredded us to pieces — cracking us asunder under a dizzying panorama of sell orders?

As a matter of fact there was, circa 2003-2008.

Look at that looong period of nothingness, how the market annihilated and crushed the spirits of those betting against her. It was a sight to behold. We quite literally went from end of the world to becoming virile and filled with purpose again — almost overnight. Naturally, as the story goes, it all ended with the housing crash — spurred on by Federal Reserve interest rate hikes — 16 consecutive hikes in fact — as Greenspan sought to ‘normalize’ rates. Sound familiar?

And here we are today, with enough lassitude on the bear side to consider them to be non-existent. Markets drift higher on a daily basis, compressing the VIX index to and below $10, all the while risks mount.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves by drawing parallels between then and now. After all, we’re not in a housing bubble, at least in the sub million dollar Mcmansions. This go around, all of the gains in real estate, or most of them, are found in multi-million dollar homes. The only notable risks that I can think of at this time is the complete annihilation of the retail landscape, best represented in America by its shopping malls. The zombie oil and gas industry, filled with companies barely capable of paying off their interest on debt. Once rates go higher, it will be very hard for them to exist. And, lastly, let’s not forget the juxtaposition of plummeting demographics and soaring sovereign debt. The entirety of Europe is on a ruinous path of spiraling populations, due to lack of offsprings, and record high leverage on their balance sheets.

How can Italy survive, and the EU for that matter, when their population will halve inside 40 years? The same goes for Japan and several other western nations.

For now, enjoy the bull.

On July the 7th, 2017, President Donald Trump had a so called ‘couples dinner’ with Vladimir Putin and other unsavory world leaders, which was never disclosed to our free press.

It gets worse.

Here is a picture of Melania Trump telling Putin America’s nuclear codes.

Melania Trump discussing with Putin how to best destroy America

We now go to our friends at CNN for full coverage.

No one knows what took place in that dinner, which was attended by evil dictators, like Japanese ruler Shinzo Abe, Germany’s Fascist Leader Angela Merkel and many others.

The White House is downplaying this so called dinner, by saying “It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a president’s duties, to interact with world leaders.”

Sure.

The President is going haywire on Twitter, trying to defend his indefensible offenses.

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

If matters couldn’t get worse in the White House, Trump just nominated John Huntsman to be Ambassador to Russia, who, conveniently has 6 offices in Russia belonging to his multi-national chemical giant corporation.

Doc: Trump's nominating Jon Huntsman for Ambassador to Russia-Huntsman's fam biz has at least 6 offices in Russia. #TrumpRussia #Resist pic.twitter.com/OgOb1a4UwF

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) July 18, 2017

One meeting is just fine. But two meetings, that we cannot abide.

Tucker Carlson and Brit Hume weigh in.

How will you recover?

NASDAQ hits another all time high. #maga

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 18, 2017

Record highs in the NASDAQ, led by FAANG and THAT FAG PUB.

It is virtually impossible to unseat Trump or any other republicans whilst markets are at record highs. If you want to impeach Trump, you better work on derailing this stock market.

Godspeed.

God I love this guy. I will not sit here and cast aspersions upon his person, a man dedicated to ‘smashing the fash’. In an unbelievable trolling expedition on the Jesse Waters show, this man went onto his show and declared allegiance to ANTIFA  — ironically defending the stabbing of police horses in the neck because they were racist.

Well now ‘Kevin’ is responding to his debut on national television, with a hilarious video where he declared ‘the national news media belongs to me now.’ Amongst other things, his mission is to ‘smash the fash’, saying he throws bricks through his own window and blames it on the alt-right. He’s the guy who’s out spray painting swastikas on his own synagogues, just to make Drumpf supporters look bad.

NOTE: I love the Karl Marx picture frame in the background, just adjacent to a large bottle of lotion. Here’s how Kevin got started in ANTIFA, a must watch for those of you interested in resisting Drumpf.

How many of you faggots are long AAOI because of the AMZN datacenter 100g upgrade cycle? I bet zero of you, myself included. Nevertheless, we’re in a market that is splintered, with retail, commodities, healthcare and industrials flagging, all the while tech surges to record highs.

This is, without question, reminiscent to the days of 2000, when my friends and I would lay waste to the old men snoring in the boardroom, long ‘old economy’ stocks. As punk youngsters in dot coms, the ‘new economy’ offered both opportunity and profit. I’d take market gains and spend them, thriftlessly, at my personal jeweler. I did everything wrong, as a young moron market participant in the latter days of the tech bubble.

Today, we have grandeur in a select few stocks, heavily owned by the laziest asset managers the world has ever known.

Here are today’s standouts.
SPWR, AAOI, MTCH, VSLR, VIPS, OLED, JD, SHOP, TWOU, DIOD, YELP, YY, SHOP, BABA.

Here are some non-tech stocks making waves.
RH, RAD, LFUS, TREE, TSLA, WYNN and of course PETS.

All of those stocks, more or less, irk me — save YELP. But no stock annoys me more than FIZZ, the makers of the ridiculous flavored water La Croix. Whenever I see those fucking cans in the store, I recoil. Upon seeing people place them into their wagons, I rage. I don’t know exactly why it makes me so mad — maybe because I missed the trend and used to talk about the stock when it was $15. Now that revenues and earnings are soaring, thanks to a ridiculous surge in flavored sparkling water in this country, I seethe with contempt.

Truth be told, the country is enwrapped in a sparkling water fad, in the same sort of way that drove MNST and Green Mountain Coffee higher in the early days. Admittedly, as much as I’d like to see the company bankrupted under a heap of returned La Croix cans, the stock is likely to trade higher.

You didn’t actually think Trumpcare stood a chance, did you? The only form of healthcare that would be supported on the right is nothing at all — wild west corporate hegemony. The left wants socializedcare — but a fucked up version that crushes the hearts and souls of the middle class. I’ll say it again, no healthcare plan worth its salt will ever benefit both the consumer and the corporate America. There must be significant controls and concessions made by the healthcare industry, else we’re just shuffling chairs on the Titanic.

Naturally, the rightwingers are so upset over this debacle. Here’s VP Pence, angered, telling congress to ‘get to work.’

Spare me the fucking platitudes.

Or how about this nutcase, Senator McConnell, pretending that he cares about the poor little American people.

The whole thing is a farce and I knew it because healthcare stocks have been rising ever since this Trumpcare horseshit was revealed. They rose with Obamacare too, so don’t act like the democrat plan was any better. For this to work, we need to fucking fleece the healthcare and drug companies, communist style. Raid their offices, club to death a few senior management, and order them to lower prices — else face death.

The Senate must go to a 51 vote majority instead of current 60 votes. Even parts of full Repeal need 60. 8 Dems control Senate. Crazy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

With only a very small majority, the Republicans in the House & Senate need more victories next year since Dems totally obstruct, no votes!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

President Drumpf seems to think the best way to pass this crooked piece of legislation is to lower the bar to pass laws in the Senate from 60 to 51, a simple majority. Libfags were proposing this in 2010.

WRONG.

Americans don’t trust any of you and would prefer to keep the 60 vote majority in order to stop faggots from ruining the country. It’s nice to have a majority — but it’s also important to at least get a handful of people from the other party to agree, right?

So, for now, healthcare and repeal are dead. Obamacare is the law of the land, and the market is yawning as a result.

UPDATE: Trump responds — ‘Let Obamacare fail.’

Quick update for you homegamers out there — trying to avoid blowing up your retirement accounts. In spite of the market being ‘weak’ today, both the FAANG and the newly minted THAT FAG PUB investment strategies are doing just fine.

Let’s have a look.

Want to know something cool? Of course you do.

The FAANG stocks (FB, AMZN, AAPL, NFLX and GOOGL) represent almost 25% of the entire market cap of the tech sector now. THAT FAG PUB, with a market cap of over $4 trillion, represents more than 40% of the tech sector.

How splendid.

Without any meaningful pullback in market leadership, as highlighted above, you should assume this market dip will be ‘corrected’ and absorbed back into the deep buyers’ brokerage accounts.

The Dow is starting to accelerate to the downside, but the Nasdaq and S&P are little changed. The mood could not be different in Europe, land of the cuck and dagger, where the DAX is leading the fray lower by 1.45%. The Eurostoxx 50 is off by 1.34%, representative of the entire continent.

Over here, we’re enjoying another, rather tumultuous, decline in the dollar — off by 0.87% v the euro.

Cryptocurrencies are all the rage — higher by ~15% — totally normal for a store of value.

Commodities, as you would expect with the dollar lower, are higher: gold is +0.7% and WTI +0.85%.

Goldman is off by 2.5%, as the company turned in its worst trading quarter during Blankfein’s reign of terror. Some people are starting to believe GS has a talent problem, like PG. Maybe they’re not ‘worldly enough?’

Total trading revenue, which also includes equities, fell 17 percent for the three-month period, to $3.05 billion. That missed analysts’ $3.13 billion estimate. In fixed-income trading, the bank cited “significantly lower” revenue from trading in interest rates, commodities, credit products and currencies. Stock trading rose 8 percent to $1.89 billion, surpassing analysts’ $1.71 billion prediction.

The market looks dreadful today, with just 30% of stocks higher. The only respite seems to be in gold and other commodity related sectors. Banks and homebuilders seem to be bearing the brunt of today’s weak tape.

Unlike many of you boozehounds who fashion themselves to be self-taught ‘history buffs’, I actually read books and do not depend upon Alex Jones or Youtube for my information. Realizing that history is literally tailored by the victors, I take mostly everything with a certain degree of skepticism.

However, good prose is incontrovertible and cannot be misconstrued or contested. Aside from being an extraordinary leader, Winston Churchill was also an amazing author. I’ve read most of his books — but what captivated me the most was his accounts of the 2nd World War. While the written word is almost always better than audio books, I must admit, this version of The History of the Second World War, narrated beautifully by Michael Jayston, is an absolute masterpiece.

Not only is it supremely atmospheric, it makes the listener feel like he’s peering into a lecture by Mr. Champagne and Cigars, Winston Churchill himself.

I strongly recommend the purchase of the entire series, which you can find on Audible. I listened to it on my NSA listening device, Alexa Echo, and was saddened when it was over. It was that good.

In light of the movie Dunkirk coming to theaters soon, I secured a section of the book where Winston documented France’s capitulation and the evacuation at Dunkirk for you.

Enjoy.