If you are invested in Weight Watchers right now you are invested in Oprah.  It is similar to investing in Tesla.  You want a piece of Elon–TSLA.  You want a piece of the O empire–WTW.  I thought I wanted a piece of the Oprah empire after her latest Weight Watchers promo video.  I think she actually squeezes out a few tears during the stunt:

I took a long the day she dropped this vid, and the next day I was up a cool 15 percent.  I was full on loving Oprah and her movie.  Now the position has gone 18% against me and I want to punch her in the face.

Oprah needs to hit the street and entertain woman aged 29-50 ASAP.  This stock needs to show signs, any signs, of life otherwise I will cut the loss ahead of the weekend and eat 2 quarts of iced cream whist buying wares from QVC.

There is something you need to understand about the people of China.  They are not free thinkers like you and me.  Instead, they take orders from their leaders and follow them vehemently.  Any downtime is spent pacing, smoking, and hoping for the next order of business.  For a minute, it almost looked like the Chinese economy had footing and that businesses could exist to serve their domestic consumers.  However their consumer is weak, their cities are empty, and their poorly manipulated stock market is in shambles.  This is great news for Walmart.  They can now go back to demanding shiploads of useless wares from the strapped nation for pennies on the dollar.  Walmart wins when China stumbles.

Pretty much everything sold inside Walmart is made in China.  From electronics to food and furniture, you are looking at tier one China manufacturing.

Walmart is a good leader.  They are big and strong.  Do you want a wolf leading a pack of sheep?  Or a sheep leading a pack of wolves?  Order has been restored.

Several retailers are doing well today, but I get a strong sense of patriotism seeing Walmart power thrusting.  It helps I am long of WMT, in US dollar terms.  I have zero intention of selling either.  They are my retail fix from back when getting a retail fix was not cool.

Trading the NASDAQ is sort of like trading Apple with some outside noise.  The company is such a huge piece of the index that a bump in APPL stock sends ripples into the futures.  Therefore when rumor of a 30% production cut on the iPhone 6 and 6+ hit the streets (so cliché, so gay) sellers piled in.  There are a few factors that make the whispers seem legit.

Andriod phones have gotten really nice.  Over the holiday I saw several of the new Samsung phones, including the S6 Edge and was blown away by the quality.  If a person can stomach abandoning years of spending inside the App Store and iTunes, they can buy phones with better cameras that are new and sexy.  They can be used to fly drones also.

Apple is probably going to launch the iPhone 7 soon.  God knows they need another hit phone.  The pro tablet is only being maximized by Jeff Macke.  People who cannot grasp the utility of the pen prefer to remind everyone that Apple must have “blew it” if they are selling a stylus (Steve’s words, not mine).  The watch, nobody wants a tech watch.  Look at what Fitbit did today when they moronically released a damned Apple watch knockoff at the Vegas Consumer Electronics Show…down 18 BIG ONES.  Smart watches are toxic.  I have fully digressed.  Why keep making iPhone 6 when 7 is coming in hot?

China.  The Chinese spent last year using iPhones as currency.  These lunatics, lemmings void of independent reasoning, must have stock piles of iPhones.  Soon an iPhone 6 may not even buy a week’s worth of groceries.

Sometimes a rumor makes sense.  When it does, it is considered fact.  So while the news came from Nikkei Asian Review (Lolz) Apple is guilty until proven innocent.

Aside: I never check the futures after hours.  There are enough hours during cash and I feel like its bad for the soul.  Big ups to the after hours traders.  Be on the lookout for more Apple talk hitting the tape this week.  Also, remember, FOMC minutes tomorrow afternoon–major key driver of overall market direction through Friday morning (when they drop NFP).

Stay loose for now, so when it comes time you can be sharp.  Want to see how I stay loose?  Follow me on snapchat for closeups of me stretching and pumping iron: Vcali.

Boy how low-tier news sources like to throw around the ‘C’ word.  Tesla Motors is down a quick 7% on the session after they reported delivering 17,400 vehicles in the fourth quarter.  The number was met with grief because the company delivered as promised.

The management team at Tesla estimated 50-52k Model X and S cars would be delivered, and they managed to deliver 50,580.  This sounds like a company that has a decent handle on their process and did a good job communicating with the dolts of Wall Street.

The stock was up 8% in 2015 and erased those gains in a single day.  It sucks, I suppose, but it is not a crash.  Welcome to high valuation story stock investing, asshats.

Cavemen like to point to the burn rate over at Tesla with their stubby fingers, citing their negative $550 million dollar net cash flow last year.  They talk about how this path is unsustainable.  I do not listen to close minded, bumbling fools.  I do listen to top Tesla employees, however, and rumor is they have a cash flow positive party planned for 2016.  A big one.

I consider any major dip in Tesla a buying opportunity.  I also consider minor dips buying opportunities, but for now I am just chilling–letting the pros slug each other in the ribs and scrotum (scroti?  is there a plural form?).

Tesla motors is not crashing.  It is taking heat on a hot market day.  If you cannot take it, buy some burnt up carbon like WMT.

I swear this stock will never go up again.  What a constant comedy, this company is, now again in the hot seat after analyst Ken Sena threw shade on the bird.

Citing comScore and a few ISIs surveys, Sena thinks the prevailing 325 million MAU estimate is not likely.

He also expects their US advertising revenues–promoting your tweet to the cavemen of Turkey–to grow below the royal 20% making their growth story kind of bleak.

Nothing like the success of Instagram and Snapchat, Sena adds.

While at it, he dropped at $22 profit target on Twitter shares.

All this analyst dogging has the shares down about 4% heading into the close, on a day when the broad market is lethargically ripping.

If there is a silver lining in the Twitter story it is my niece, who is leagues cooler than me or you, who says Twitter is the best behind only Snapchat.  We have hope.  Nevertheless, this stock continues to be the worst one on the planet–and my largest position.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.” – Winston Churchill

The fact is woman have been liberated from the kitchen.  Gone are the days when 2-3 meals were expected to be on the table per the chef wife–whose duties also included keeping the house tidy, cleaning the children and dog, procuring groceries, clothing, all holiday and birthday presents, and decorating the house with knickknacks.

The void has been filled with fast causal food.  Desolate men, living the American dream via 50 hours of hard cubicle time, rank file into burger, burrito, and chicken joints for sustenance.  They sit, alone or with other inmates…er coworkers, expanding their girth 1200 calories at a time.  This is not changing anytime soon.

Chipotle was a safe place for them.  It ‘looked’ clean.  The help was sometimes cute.  It was beans, rice, and guacamole so it must be healthy, right?  WRONG!  Poison bitches, poison…the terrorists aren’t the only ones winning, deadly bacteria is too.

Now what?  Where do they go?  These are real issues facing the first world.

My top pick is LOCO because it is delicious and crasy [sic].  I wonder if Wingstop paid dork Brian Sozzi to go fork and knife one of their wings today?  I digress.  I bought some LOCO today.

What is your favorite horse in this race?  This race to dethrone the big shots at Chipotle?

“People love it when you lose, they love dirty laundry.” – Don Henley

I am trying to find my way into Paypal shares.  The online merchant allows users to transact in bitcoin, which intrigues me.

Bitcoin is worth about $350 right now, and anyone with this super currency has plenty of ways to convert it into goods and services.  These video game bux are a very real form of payment.

The stock had a nice push from the $35 handle today. If we get a check back to this region I am going to be there, bidding the long.  Risk to the double low at $33.85.

Aside from outright bitcoin ownership, I think this is one the best ways to expose some investment risk to the bitcoin empire.

If we head south this month, Chipotle is my horse for the ride.  They have the disgusting E. Coli funk all over their restaurants.

Seasonality-wise, now is when I am most likely to rely on fast causal foods.  It is like putting up Christmas decorations to beat back the depression, it satisfies my impulses.  This year, I would rather eat my shoe than a hot bowl of Mexi-American E. Coli.  My stomach has enough issues, what with the relatives and their homemade cakes.

I guess what I am saying is, as a company, this is not the time to screw up.  This is when you execute like a boss and reap the blessings.  If not I have no sympathy for you.  Maybe next year, Chipotle.

Normally I short the whole biotech industry when my bias skews bear.  And I probably will again–but I am also going to be stalking shorts in CMG.

Congratulations to Priscilla and Mark on their new baby.  In a heartfelt Facebook note, the new parents wrote a decree to their daughter, Max, promising to give 99% of their Facebook stock away as part of their mission to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation.  Two of the main areas they want to invest their resources in are medicine and education.  In particular, they see a huge opportunity in curing disease:

“Consider disease. Today we spend about 50 times more as a society treating people who are sick than we invest in research so you won’t get sick in the first place.  Medicine has only been a real science for less than 100 years, and we’ve already seen complete cures for some diseases and good progress for others. As technology accelerates, we have a real shot at preventing, curing or managing all or most of the rest in the next 100 years.  Today, most people die from five things — heart disease, cancer, stroke, neurodegenerative and infectious diseases — and we can make faster progress on these and other problems.  Once we recognize that your generation and your children’s generation may not have to suffer from disease, we collectively have a responsibility to tilt our investments a bit more towards the future to make this reality. Your mother and I want to do our part.”

Major life events like birth and death tend to bring forth our clearest thoughts on how to live life as we hurl around the sun on spaceship earth.  Mark sees medicine (biotechnology) and education as the two biggest opportunities to make the world better for his daughter.  Interesting.  You can read the full note by clicking here.

PS – THIS IS BULLISH FOR FACEBOOK

The best time to share your bearish research is right when a stock is making a new swing high.  You want demand to completely vanish at these new price levels, therefore rendering the market susceptible to a fast move in the opposite direction.

The fake breakout/breakdown has been the most actionable swing trade setup for nearly a year now.  I use it almost exclusively to choose (and avoid) trades.

Perhaps Mark Spiegel and his consortium of short sellers have seen this pattern’s effectiveness and thus chose today to share their linkfest of a report decrying the proprietary technology of Tesla Motors.  Or they do not look at price charts whatsoever and this is a mere coincidence.  Nevertheless, he is defending his TSLA short today, while touting his degenerate long position in some penny stock named ELON.

Cool reports bruh.  I will stick with Tesla though.