This rumor makes the rounds about once a month, and traders go apeshit, bidding FIT shares up like it’s not a shallow-moat wearable good:
Nike rumored to takeover Fitbit.
It would be a dumb purchase by Nike, but then again Beats By Dre was a dumb purchase by Apple and look, it went through!
Look for Fitbit to rally for a few days off the news, then fizzle, like every good-intention attempt for the soda and beer drinking American to lose their well-established gut.
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PepsiCo earnings were released this morning and the stock is higher by 2% after the company reported stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings.
Their Latin American sales sucked sugar cane because of the ‘deconsolidation of Venezuelan operations’ which is corporate-speak for Venezuela is muscling their soda plant by strangling supply channels and arresting line workers.
European sales lagged also, mostly driven by foreign exchange rates and perhaps their proclivity to drink coffee. Asian sales slumped a touch, but do not count them out, for they love to be as John Wayne American as possible and care not about their oral health.
Pepsi’s slowdown in global growth does not concern investors because back home in the United States people are guzzling sugar drink like politicians are threatening to take it away, second amendment paranoia-style. Sales surged in North America, both of beverage and snack. Their boxed oats line, The Quakers, grew as well.
Investors want staples, especially American ones because our habits are deeply embedded. Long live sugar drink, smokes, beer, and industrial meat manufacturing.
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The land grab continues as state-backed Chinese investors, levered to the gills and flush with cash, have convinced the Italians to sell them AC Milan.
The soccer club is owned by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. This is the Italian equivalent of China buying the New York Yankees:
Silvio Berlusconi’s long quest to find a new owner for his football club AC Milan appears to be close to a conclusion with the former Italian prime minister saying he has agreed to a deal with a Chinese group.
The deal underscores China’s push to buy football assets across the globe, including the sale of Aston Villa to Chinese businessman Dr Tony Xia.
The Berlusconi family’s investment vehicle has been in exclusive talks with the Asian investors who have been conducting detailed analysis of the club’s finances for several months.
The deal is unlikely to be made official until next week at the earliest, according to two people familiar with the matter. They said that several small details still need to be worked out before an official statement can be made. They asked not to be identified because contracts have yet to be signed.
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A fella by the name of Milo Yiannopoulos is causing quite the stir on Twitter today after the company briefly suspended his account.
The suspension occurred after several death threats were lobbied at his person. Milo planned to give a press conference on Islam and gays down in Orlando, following the terrorist attack on Pulse, a club predominately attended by gay people.
Shares of Twitter have been running like a banshee the last three days. The stock is up over 15% this week. Perhaps the upward move is driven by Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud accumulating more ownership of the company. According to recent filings, the Saudi prince now owns more TWTR shares then the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey.
The Twitter ban on Milo resulted in the #FreeMilo hashtag trending worldwide. Twitter’s authoritarian behavior and sharia-compliance also made front page on Drudge Report:
Shares of Twitter are the ultimate tragedy play. The platform is designed to excel when terrible things happen and news is breaking fast. They even have Periscope, aka an army of eyeballs everywhere to capture…well mostly fires.
Twitter also loves a dog tape. So while summer stock markets are looking super sketchy, Twitter is looking bullish fam.
Meanwhile, stay tuned as we await comments from Twitter LOLZ
We're approaching Twitter for comment. Do we have to do it in Arabic, @jack?
— Milo Yiannopoulos ✘ (@Nero) June 15, 2016
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This is the kind of militant group I can get behind. They have likely committed unspeakable crimes against the indigenous population, but looking past such atrocities these guys have all the markings of an 80’s action film.
I envision some British bloke, hailing from Johannesburg, running this outfit. His top two guys are defects from the SAS. They always show up in a Range Rover after their bandits complete the job, talking on a steel-case satellite phone, telling their clients where to wire the money.
Plus fuck oil and everyone who sucks it out of the ground.
Citizens of Nigeria are cursed by their commodity. Violence will continue. The attack was tweeted out and later confirmed by a Nigerian Security Official.
I wonder where they get all that kickass artillery?
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The robots are taking over all summer jobs.
Unemployment rate 4.7% verse 4.9% forecast
Change in non-farm payrolls 38k verse 160k forecast
Unemployment rate is lower but so what? Look at that change in NFP, brutal.
Traders expectations for a June rate hike have been tempered. The initial reaction is selling across U.S. index futures. They are currently pricing about a 5% chance of a June rate hike down at the CME Group:
UPDATE – Traders are pricing in only a 3.8% chance of a rate hike, post NFP:
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His holiness Elon, speaking from the pulpit of Re/code, delivered a sermon to his devoted followers. His words are being feverishly transcribed by disciples onto internet parchment–places like the iBankCoin and Wired. The disciple Mikey (no mouse) captured this sacred proverb from Elon, preserving it on the pages of Apple Insider:
“I think it’s great they’re doing this, and I hope it works out,” he said. “It’s just a missed opportunity. It’s a couple years…they’ll make a good car and be successful.”
The entire article can be found by clicking here but I will sum it up for you non-believers: Elon Musk is the living, breathing, walking son of God and he has come to deliver us from the evil that resoundingly originates from oil.
Fuck oil and anyone who sells it. Amen.
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Global corporations are striking international deals at urgent rates. According to the following Reuters article, the race is on the feed the quacking geese in Taiwan mid-to-high 4% corporate debt:
Liquidity in the Taiwanese bond market is flush, with long-term buyers of debt, primarily life insurance firms, seeking creditworthy names and chasing higher yields. Blue-chip multinationals regularly issue dollar bonds of such size on the island, home to Apple’s supply chain.
In December, U.S. chipmaker Intel Corp sold $915 million of 30-year bonds with yields of 4.7 percent. A month later, global brewer Anheuser Busch InBev SA issued a $1.47 billion bond of the same maturity at 4.915 percent, according to data from the Taipei Exchange, the island’s over-the-counter market.
Cash-rich and yield-hungry investors in Taiwan have made the island a haven for debt financing. These investors tend to hold through maturity, letting issuers lock in cheap pricing.
“Taiwan insurance companies don’t have enough good (quality) fixed-income investment targets,” said an official at a local securities house, declining to be identified as he was not authorised to talk to the media.
“But their funds continue to grow because in this low rate macro-environment. Consumers prefer to buy financial products offered by insurance companies rather than park money in a bank deposit,” he said.
– Source: Roger Tung, Reuters [LINK]
Perhaps the American thirst for corporate debt quenched. But in Taiwan, where times are good, the demand to hold debt is high.
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The Wall Street Journal is following up on yesterday’s BuzzFeed report [BuzzFeed Link – Click Here] about Twitter’s confirmed plan to cease funding their stupid ‘Buy’ button program. The ads were intended to turn Twitter into a virtual mall or something.
Wait. Isn’t that Amazon?
I imagine you can walk into Twitter HQ any given day, up in the extremely expensive hills of San Fransisco, and find no less than 5 bearded children sitting around a glass conference table scheming up dumb business ideas.
And since none of them get any traction, someone there has the job of putting said bearded heads on a chopping block every quarter. It’s all very bleak.
Anyhow, here is the entire WSJ article, courtesy of Googling the headline to shimmy around the paywall:
Twitter Inc. on Wednesday confirmed it is curtailing an advertisement effort that encouraged people to purchase products from merchants without leaving the social-media service.
In September 2014, Twitter began testing ads with a button that select U.S. merchants sell their wares directly on Twitter. The hope was these ads could transform Twitter into something of a virtual shopping mall and drive new advertising revenue. They opened up the ad to U.S. merchants of all sizes the following year.
A Twitter spokesman said the company will no longer devote resources to supporting the development of the ads for the foreseeable future. Instead, the company has reallocated resources in favor of a different kind of retail-related ad product that it said has gained more traction with its retail partners.
BuzzFeed News earlier reported that Twitter would end product development on the “buy button” ads and shift its commerce team into other divisions within the company.
The Twitter spokesman said the commerce team will shift its efforts to focus on customer service and commerce-related ads, which have shown greater success for retailers. These ads, called dynamic product ads, show users images of products that they had previously viewed on the advertiser’s website but for whatever reason had decided not to purchase. If a user clicks on the ad, it takes them back to the specific product page on the retailer’s site.
RELATED
Twitter Tweaks Will Make 140-Character Limit Roomier (May 24) [RAUL NOTE: THEY ALSO ANNOUNCE NEW FEATURES THEN DON’T ACTIVATE THEM]
Twitter Looks to Video to Increase Advertising Sales (May 1)
Twitter Posts Disappointing Revenue and Forecast (Apr. 26)
Social commerce burst onto the scene in recent years as platforms such as Twitter, Facebook Inc. and Pinterest Inc. all started testing “buy buttons” on their respective services. But it appears consumers aren’t yet ready to open their wallets while checking their social feeds.Facebook, which has tested buy buttons, has in recent years poured greater resources into dynamic product ads instead. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg noted in an earnings call with analysts last July that the company’s e-commerce objective is to connect its users with marketers rather than selling retailers’ wares directly on the service.
News of Twitter’s commerce-ad shift came on the same day that CEO Jack Dorsey sought to reassure frustrated shareholders that the social media service is headed in the right direction.Mr. Dorsey, speaking along with other executives at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in San Francisco, answered investor queries that ranged from his plans to revive the company’s stalled user growth to what all those high-paid engineers are actually doing.
In introductory remarks, Mr. Dorsey emphasized the company’s top priorities and its progress over the past year. He pointed to the announcement on Tuesday that Twitter was tweaking its format to not count media attachments and usernames sent in reply tweets against its signature 140-character limit in an attempt to make the product easier to use.
The 40 some shareholders who showed up at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco were polite during the question-and-answer session with executives. But some shareholders, such as one who identified himself as Keith Miller from North Carolina, shared what the view looked like from the investor seats: “The stock price is stuck in the mud,“ he said. ”…Within the company the ’geekdom’ is very happy and is very positive, but out here in the marketplace everybody else is saying it’s too hard to use.”
Mr. Miller described the company’s sluggish user growth and advertising revenue per use as both “not very impressive.”
Mr. Dorsey acknowledged the product’s weaknesses and asked Mr. Miller for more time. “We know that there are areas of the product that people don’t understand,” he said. ”They don’t understand how it works and it’s inhibiting a lot of usage. We’re focused on the one thing that we can control, which is building an experience that people want to use and experience every single day. It’s going to take time.”
During the meeting, the shareholders officially approved the appointment of PepsiCo Vice Chairman and CFO Hugh Johnston, and also re-elected Mr. Dorsey, to the board. The shareholders also approved Mr. Dorsey’s plan to donate about 6.8 million of his Twitter shares, representing about one third of his total Twitter shares, to the employee equity pool.
Twitter shares [ticker – TWTR] are hovering near all-time lows:
Hundreds of tax officials and law enforcement flooded into Google Paris this morning. Reports started around 7am. Le Police nationale came rolling up with their silly sirens, and they’re out for black-and-white proof of something, anything, that can buoy the fledgling European Union.
The jig is up, global businesses. Europe is a hell hole. The safe havens in Ireland will soon be called into question. Interesting times.
Here’s a link to the French news site breaking the news. You may need to use Google Translate to work through it (IRONY!).
UPDATE: The stock [ticker: $GOOGL] is set to gap up $3 bucks on the news.
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