My Take on the Week that Past and What Lies Ahead

Stocks ended the week a little more than 1% higher, hardly an attestation of a great bull market. Year to date, the SPY is higher by 7.6%, while GLD is up 26% and TLT 16%. VNQ, the largest REIT ETF traded, is higher by 14% — not including the 3.3% yield it pays. On a micro level, there’ve been chockful of trading opportunities since the bottom, which far exceeds anything enjoyed in the aforementioned names above. However, I hardly know any bulls who missed out on the early 2016 drubbing. Do you?

The point I am making is that markets, as a whole, haven’t done all that much so far. If we were to closely monitor where the glacial, slow — but certain, money has been going, without question it has gone into bonds, gold and REITs.

For the week, stocks rejoiced after being harangued over a fortnight — due to unnecessary and unwarranted concerns over a Fed rate hike. Markets gave up the ghost today, and although losses were limited, I didn’t like the action in oil at all. My entire bear thesis hinges, mind you, on a precipitous drop in crude oil — which will then lead to the inevitable destruction of credit lines and subsequent equity positions. This deleterious effect on energy balance sheets will spill over into the banking sector, bringing with it a credit tightening that will tip the scales — placing America where it belongs — into an arduous recession.

I do not wish cast these events; I only know them to be our eventuality.

I remain steadfast, almost obstinate, long TLT, GLD, several miners, and cash.

I can appreciate a good yarn, just like the next man. All of the iPhone 7 hype of a few weeks ago, which provided the shares of AAPL with great succor, was apparently a fiction.

Upon the launch of the iPhone 7, Gene Munster, analyst at Pipe Jaffray, said the lines for the iPhone 7 were shockingly small — in comparison to previous launches. Gene literally goes out to the NYC flagship store and counts the people on line. He said there were only 400 people on line, compared to 650 for the iPhone 6s and 1,880 for the iPhone 6.

Then today a German research firm, GFK, said sales during the weekend launch for iPhone 7 and 7 Plus were down by 25% Y/Y — compared to the first weekend of the 6S and 6Plus.

Last night, Digitimes reported chip orders for the new phone were down sharply — off by 20%.

Apple has requested its manufacturing partners stock ICs for a combined 50 million iPhone 7/7 Plus units in the third quarter of 2016, and another 45 million units in the fourth quarter, according to sources at analog chip firms. The estimated volume for the first quarter of 2017 has reduced to 35-37 million units, said the sources.

If it weren’t for the fact that Samsung’s new phone is literally blowing up and causing fires, Apple shareholders might’ve been a little worried following these reports.
As such, shares of Apple are off by a whole 1.5%. Whoa. Look at below, fuckers.

AAPL is higher by 4.4% over the past month — one giant circle jerk.

The lengths humans will go to troll is undeniably our greatest failures as a species.

The bedraggled drunkards from the perverted forum based website, 4Chan, have begun a campaign to force Google to censor itself, after the search engine giant announced a plan to censor out racism from its search results.

Via Craveonline

Members of 4chan’s “politically incorrect” board /pol/ have begun “Operation Google,” which aims to circumnavigate the search engine’s new AI program to remove bigoted and racist posts and comments from the internet by filling the search engine with more bigotry and racism.

Google recently announced Conversation AI, a new program created by Google subsidiary Jigsaw, which aims to help put an end to online harassment. As noted in a Wired feature detailing the program, thus far moderation on the internet has been conducted by humans, though this can often have a damaging effect on the individuals who are forced to sift through posts and comments sections often containing hateful and bigoted language. As such, Jigsaw hopes that its program will be able to swiftly and effectively conduct this moderation on the fly, granting websites the opportunity to utilize Conversation AI to moderate content posted to the site by their users for them. Wikipedia and The New York Times are already testing out the program, and while Wired noted issues with its ability to detect certain language, it is hoped that eventually the program will be able to successfully distinguish between “harmless banter and harassment” in order solve the problem of “making people be nicer on the internet.”

However, 4chan has taken umbrage with this program, with its members orchestrating the abhorrent “Operation Google” in an attempt to continue to spread hate speech across the internet. Operation Google was outlined by 4chan members as an effort to replace the “n-word” with the word “Google,” in order to “make it so Google would have to censor their own company by making them a racial slur towards blacks.” The Operation Google “manifesto” can be read below:

In other words, 4Chan users have begun creating memes, replacing the ‘N’ word with Google, in order to create a negative connotation around the word — forcing Google to censor itself into oblivion. lolz

Oh boy.

I posed this question in a recent Twitter poll. Feel free to vote.

Who will buy $TWTR?

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) September 23, 2016

Rumors are running rampant, courtesy of David Faber, regarding an imminent deal to purchase the piece of shit social media company. While Twitter is widely revered by those in the media as a place to distribute news and oppress those who fail to adhere to a specific social code, most shareholders fucking hate the company and would love nothing more than to see it sold.

The shares are higher by 18% on the news, still well below its IPO price of $26 from three years ago.

If we had a government that sought to protect against a monopoly forming in media, there’s no way they’d permit Google to buy them. Why in the world would CRM want to buy Twitter? That makes no fucking sense at all. They’re in the CRM business, not media. Should they purchase TWTR, expect the share price of CRM to get clown raped.

This leaves us with just one entity left to buy Twitter: The House of Saud, led by the affable and delightfully hedonistic, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — who already owns 5% of the company. If Saudi Arabia bought Twitter, they could gain access to a treasure trove of infidels for rapid extermination. Think of all the synergies an evil empire like that could implement if given the keys to buy Twitter. Since our government is beholden to the Kingdom, I am certain it would get regulatory approval straight away. My only question is, should Saudi Arabia buy Twitter, will they permit women and gays to tweet anymore?

Then there’s always this to consider.

One of the interesting narratives about the Obama-Iranian alliance is that is has applied pressure to our friends, the Saudis. You know, the people who ‘demolitioned’ the World Trade Towers.

The House of Saud has offered to freeze production at an absurd 10.7m barrels per day, way above any historical level over the past decade.

Iran, fresh off of getting out of sanctions, was like ‘go fuck yourself,’ when asked to adhere to some sort of oil freeze. They’re just getting back in. Also, and bear in mind, Iran is capable of producing triple the current amount, which is only 3.6m bpd.

In other words, a deal that was never going to get done didn’t get done, so now oil is collapsing. Makes sense?

Look at this shit, utterly retarded.

WTI is cascading lower, off by 3.4%.

As many of you know, “The Fly” is calling for the end of western finance sometime this century. For most of you who aren’t immortal, you might miss this momentous event. I, on the other hand, intend to preside over this event, fully robed and flowing, leather sandals adorned like Moses, which is forthcoming in the most earnest of ways. Moreover, I fully intend to profit from it — feeding off the blood and the accounts of those foolish enough to believe they could live so carelessly and ignore the perils of rigged markets indefinitely.

But today’s weakness is a mere pittance, a distraction from the true dangers that lurk around the bend.

Markets have broken out of their recent ranges and will most likely trend higher for the next week or so. Having algorithmic intelligence at my finger tips, in Exodus, I can tell you that shorting into hot markets is a low probability bet.

Listen to me. This isn’t the moment of truth or the time to go all in bearish. This is a farce, a ruse, to lure you into an indelible circumstance from which you will depart all the lesser. Bide your time and take a few moments to enjoy the North Eastern foliage and take heart in the fact that a great storm of epic proportions is coming and that when it comes you’ll be prepared. But for now, avoid any temptations to venture out into haphazard bear traps.

Stay aboard the ark, or in the mine, for they are impenetrable vessels, impervious to inclement conditions and deleterious winds that pose grave risks to your well being.

The ceasefire agreement was in place and the possibility of normalcy was within reach. But, according to Russian officials, the deal fell through because the U.S. wanted to keep it secret.

Then American planes bombed and killed dozens of Syrian soldiers, for the benefit of ISIS, later admitting to making a mistake. The next day Russia bombed a UN convoy that was allegedly accompanied by armed rebels. So he we are now, worse off than before.

Thank you Secretary Kerry. Top notch diplomacy efforts.

Ammar al Selmo, the head of civil defense rescue service in opposition-held Aleppo, said three of its four centers in Aleppo had been hit. “What’s happening now is annihilation in every sense of the word,” he told Reuters. “Today the bombardment is more violent, with a larger number of planes.”

Assad remains defiant, saying on Thursday he expected the conflict to “drag on” as long as it is part of a global conflict in which the groups fighting him are backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the United States.

The International Syria Support Group, including Moscow, Washington and other major powers, met on the sidelines of the annual United Nations gathering of world leaders in New York.
“We have exchanged ideas with the Russians and we plan to consult tomorrow with respect to those ideas,” Kerry said, expressing concern at the reports of the planned new Syrian offensive. “I am no less determined today than I was yesterday but I am even more frustrated.”

Maybe if we weren’t pursuing regime change policies around the world and supporting ISIS with air cover, Kerry might find his job far less beguiling.

IMPV is way up this morning, following a Bloomberg report which stated there were multiple bidders for the company and that a deal was imminent.

RBC notes Bloomberg is reporting that there could be several bidders for Imperva including CSCO, IBM and Forcepoint, which is backed by RTN and Vista Equity Partners. Each could make some sense to us as Cisco has a strategy to build out a larger security presence, IBM is the most direct competitor with Guardium and Forcepoint has been active in M&A recently with last year’s acquisition of Websense. As a reminder, the average EV/S multiple for strategic software deals is 4.4x while the average EV/S multiple for a company with 70%+ GMs (Imperva is just shy of 80%) by a strategic bidder is 6.5x. Maintain Outperform and $52 price target that reflects 4.5x EV/S on their FY/17 estimates.

If they did catch a bid, I’d expect shares of FEYE and SPLK to move higher in sympathy.

It looks like China is having troubles with spreading the risk for the eventual failure of their fucked up banking system. It’s being reported by Bloomberg that the government is set to approve CDS trading for companies, citing immense demand by market players to mitigate risk. What many people are not aware of is that China already has a CDS like system in place, called CRM. It was created in 2010 and has failed to mitigate risk miserably.

Five years into its existence, the market for credit risk mitigation (CRM) instruments — the Chinese equivalent of credit-default swaps (CDS) — remains a barren wasteland. Taking into account China’s decade-long rapid credit expansion, as well as the surge in non-performing loans and the rise in corporate bond defaults in more recent years, the failure of CRM is particularly baffling.

Indeed, when it was launched in China in late 2010, it looked like a safe bet that CRM would become a popular hedging tool in the country’s multitrillion dollar credit sector, replicating the triumphant rise of CDS in the international market in the late 1990s. Instead, the market has remained stagnant, and recently — in an effort to solve this puzzle — many pundits and CRM architects have combed through institutional, market and analytical hindrances.

The CRM market’s real bottleneck, however, may well lie in its product design.

It’s interesting to see them capitulate and adopt the CDS system, after six years of obstinate failure. Perhaps they’re merely adopting a superior system that will permit institutions to properly hedge against credit defaults. Or, maybe they foresee a whirlwind of defaults coming soon, as evidenced by the record amount of NPLs, and desire to lessen the eventual Federal burden by letting CDS trading being asap.

On the Lou Dobbs show tonight, Nigel Farage said Hillary represents a privileged, establishment, elite that have made things worse.  He then went on to say she was an ‘awful’ candidate and is the worst American presidential candidate he’s ever seen.

In part two of his rant, Farage likens the U.S. elections as a mirror image of what happened with BREXIT, warning Americans that the establishment will begin to try to instill fear and doubt in their minds, in order to sway them against voting for Trump–who clearly has the momentum.