POOF! Goodbye iBankCoin

Seventeen years ago a much younger Fly took to the internets with the intent to change the way people talked about finance. At the time, there was a wide chasm between boardroom jargon and the so called professionals, whether it was online or on CNBC. In the beginning, I was known for saying outlandish things, writing funny articles about my experiences in the market; but it wasn’t too far into the beginning of the site when the financial crisis hit and my bonafides were firmly established, having nailed that and many others since then.

The halcyon days of the blogosphere pre Twitter was something to behold and I did my part in creating a community of like minded lunatics. We traded and did it well and argued and got mad at one another; because that’s what men do when competing.

Once upon a time, the site hosted 200 bloggers, did a few public events, and regularly trolled CNBC with malicious intent. But those days are long over and I made a promise to you long ago that I’d never blog past the age of 47.5. Lo and behold, here I am at 48 with news that I am retiring from blogging as “The Fly”, in exchange for getting back into the field of professional money management.

You have to understand, I have been given a gift from God to see what others cannot and my skillset is wasted by simply talking to a gaggle of ne’erdowells. Whilst I do appreciate your evergreen support and company, The Fly was always destined for greatness and I must bid you adieu.

Many thanks to all of you who’ve read me since 2007 and before that on other sites. I have enjoyed blogging here and feel grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts and concerns with you over so many blogs: 25,000+ but who’s counting?

Plans for the future entail running my own shop, not a hedge fund but investment advisory, and I intend to do so with the utmost skill and professionalism that you’ve come to expect over the years: winship. I will continue to write, but under client portal. Thanks to the financial tools I’ve created with Stocklabs, my skills have never been better and I do intend to continue to invest in its technology.

For financial advisory inquiries, email me at [email protected].

For this important day, killing iBC on Halloween of 2024, I put together some merch for you to peruse and possible purchase, in memory of the site.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing over the years and never knew about or purchased my books, they are available on Amazon.

And now for a video goodbye from Le Fly, aka Senior Tropicana, aka HORATIO CLAWHAMMER.

Ciao and Fin.

I’ve been trading since the early 90s. I got my first chunk of money when I was 18 via an annuity that was structured for me by my mother after a lawsuit settlement following the murder of my father in 1981. She had a choice of whether to take a lump sum then or 5x the amount when I hit 18.

We weren’t very smart with the money, divvied it up and spent it almost in a manner on par with idiocy. Unlike my mother and sister, I chose to invest it in stocks because I was obsessed with them, always had been since the crash of 1987.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes with money and my relationship with it has always been contentious. I fear losing it and don’t want to revert back to not having any, not now and not ever. My behavior reflects this in my trading; but it wasn’t always this way. When I first became a stockbroker in ’97 I dabbled in junk bonds and early stage internet stocks with all of my money, because I wanted to be rich. With my money, I had plans, especially since I had my first son when I was just 21. In a sense, I have always been a father, for all of my adult life. I never went on benders or adventures with friends, but to the train and to an apartment in Bay Ridge Brooklyn to my wife and son. I wanted everything to be perfect. After all, I had always known that I was good at picking stocks and I could rely upon my instincts to guide me into the wonderful world of Wall Street.

After just 1 year in the business, I was making more money than my mother made over a 10 year period and didn’t know what to do with it. My wife wanted to buy real estate; but I shot down that idea because I had always rented and preferred to invest my money in stocks. It was in stocks where I’d make my fortune, visions of Gatsby and the Count of Monte Cristo, depending on my mood.

But after the dot com crash in 2000, all of my talents and “innate skill” was for nothing. With zero risk management experience and inability to see the forest thru those very dense and thick trees, I lost all of my money. It was during that experience that I grew into what I am now: a person conscious of risk and the gumption to act upon it. Those of you who traded with me inside Stocklabs and before that Exodus and before that The PPT understand that I am not patient and am always looking for downside surprises.

As a person, it might surprise you to learn that I am extremely bullish on people. Politics aside, I believe in the human evolutionary spirit like the best of them and it is this evergreen feeling coupled with my fear of losing money that I balance myself as an investor. You can be two things at once, long and short, depending on the arb and the timeframe. Investing is all about timeframes. You miss a trade whilst in the bathroom but an investment because you thought the President would ruin the nation.

I use AI all the time in my trading and my daily life. I barely, if ever, use $GOOGL anymore. If I need to know something I ask ChatGPT. And yes I have the paid version, which is inexorably better.

Instead of reading 80 page research reports, I have it summarize it for me and organize the way I want.

I also dump entire conference call transcripts in it to both save time and increase my efficiency.

Why am I telling you this? Because you’re all fucking morons, that’s why. I have to deal with sentimental people all the time, aging men unable to grasp mortality and the fleeting nature of what we’re trying to achieve here and they’re never ending quest to push back against progress. They view the black woman with the headscarf on the pancake box as an integral part of their childhoods and they really want that bitch back. Well sorry you fucking idiot. You cannot have tomorrow back; but you can forge into the future with a plan to execute.

Yesterday shares of $SOFI plunged after reporting better than expected results. Today the stock is +8% on very heavy volume because Wall Street isn’t always efficient. The conference call was great. Management is extremely bullish on their BNPL and credit card businesses and the stock is relatively inexpensive.

Today it was revealed that a MAJOR AI server company, $SMCI, might in fact be a fraud. The market is yawning at the resignation of E&Y and only taking down $SMCI by 30%, whilst jacking up $DELL and $HPE, who will likely take share because of this. But is everyone forgetting that $SMCI isn’t an island and that there is an entire ecosystem that goes with building servers and connecting them into the data centers?

$SMCI also is in the liquid cooling space, a field currently dominated by $VRT. Why isn’t the market bidding that up as well.

If $SMCI does $10b in annual sales, how much in sales will $NVDA lose if they go away, or is it a zero sum game, now that $DELL and $HPE will take all of their share?

My point is, the efficient market theory isn’t always exact. It’s more of a mere approximation of things as people attempt to gain information, peering into the future, trying to profit from what other people might not know.

Shares of $SMCI plunged today after their auditor Ernst and Young resigned. This coming after the company fired Deloitte back in March of 2023 raises some serious eyebrows and in my opinion means the death of the company. But on that news, competitors $DELL and $HPE ripped higher and all is well in AI cloud world again, except for the fact that $SMCI might have been committing wanton acts of FRAUD.

I view this event in the most sanguine of ways: part and parcel of the market. You are going to have these unfortunate events and maybe just maybe it’ll create an atmosphere of trust in the industry, once $SMCI is buried.

I view any pullback in the space due to this event as a buying opportunity.

My trepidation this morning about rates was somewhat resolved for the session, with a sharp drop in rates from its highs and the resumption of the AI Datacenter/Energy trade in tow.

This morning we had great numbers out of $GLW, as the build from the datacenter to civilization continues.

Now along this path there will be pops and drops, moments of discord and operational inefficiencies. But the AI network will be build, going from 400g to 800g to 1.6t datacenters; there will be bountiful profits to be enjoyed. The trick from now until then is to not get completely shaken out and know when to pull some into cash and know when to buy dips. This is when a professional, such as myself, enters the foray.

You have been reading this blog for free for many years and you’ve accumulated untold riches FEEDING like a parasite off of those, particularly me, without end. Very soon all of that, and this, will cease and I will bid you adieu.

+54bps for the session, now in a 50% cash position due to various external factors which will be revealed soon.

GOOD DAY.

These are likely the very final blogs of the site, so I want to make them useful. We are bullish providing the conditions are right. One of those conditions is lower rates. I cannot sit here and tell you that the US 10YR at 4.30% is a nothing burger. The fact that the Fed cannot assuage markets to fall in line is always troubling. I have seen this play out before and the Fed ALWAYS wins. But, make no mistake, the jitters you’re sensing in the tape with this overhang is due to the bond market fucking off.

There are many things to like about this tape, two of which are not valuations and the cost of capital. In order to justify the higher valuations under the auspices of ‘valuation expansion’, we need the cost of capital to come down.

As we ebb towards November and Americans gird themselves for large platters filled with turkey and vats of brown gravy, I’d like to remind you that stocks do not fall during the month of November. People often as me why and I simply reply “why the fuck not?”

You think too much and know too little.

For the session, I gained +48bps, down from an intraday high of +100bps. We dove into the fucking close, as is customary these days. I have been rather static in my approach, trading less, and applying normal levels of risk, so pardon me if I don’t return 4% on a day when the fucking NASDAQ is flat.

I’d like to be up triple my current level for 2024 but the Gods are preferring that I wait. It’s simply a matter of time before I bust loose again, skipping over the inevitable COLLAPSE of markets which will assuredly take those of you boasting about 10% daily gains directly into the garbage compactor to be chewed up and flushed into the fucking sewers, never to be seen or heard from again.

GOOD DAY

Back in 1994 I started my first investment in internet companies. At the time it was nascent, almost conceptional, and people thought the smaller start ups didn’t stand a chance against $MSFT and some of the larger companies.

When I became a stockbroker it was all I fixated on and early on in my career, I was wrong. The internet stocks were going down, but I wasn’t dissuaded because I felt convinced, eventually, I’d be proven right.

When the dot coms turned around and went up, you could not stop them. We enjoyed daily 10-20% gains in the next fiber play or the next company to announce a website from which they’d sell their trinkets. But, at least in the beginning, the big money was made in the companies charged with building out the infrastructure for the internet.

Fast forward to today and generative AI is all the rage. We are in the infrastructure buildout phase involving fiber and active copper and servers and switches for the datacenters needed to power the AI applications that everyone is building.

I suppose there is a chief difference between then and now, which is back then most of the dot coms were cash burning start ups, whereas the AI field is being taken up by more mature start ups and essentially every Fortune 500 company in existence.

But the similarities are striking and it makes you wonder if the industry learned from their prior experiences in overbuilding?

Back at the beginning of the internet, there were haters too, people who said it wad all a fad. The eventual winners were the major web 2.0 plays, like $META, $MSFT and $AMZN. I suspect this time will be similar, with AI 2.0 analytics and web apps working in lucrative SAAS models into market, collecting gigantic sums of money.

But we still need to build the infrastructure and from my vantage point we have a solid 3 years of growth ahead of us, akin to 1997-2000.

Act like you’ve been here for a little while, will you? Your largess daily gains and losses is disgusting and revolting to see, akin to bearing witness to someone wearing a neon green suit at a wedding. The market isn’t going anywhere and I hope you have gainful employment to the point where you enjoy the higher echelons of the tax bracket. There isn’t any need for daily 10% swings in your portfolios and, quite frankly, it’s disturbing to watch, no different from watching a fat slob, middled aged, gambling the family fortune away during a single night in Vegas.

When you come to me, you get the full package: natural talents, curiosity, honor and dignity, sophistication and most importantly decorum.

When they go to see you, people get instability, chancer, NPC moron, ribaldry, rote and banal methods designed to increase levels of gauche never seen before.

To fix yourselves, you’d have to answer some basic questions and honestly.

1. Why do I need to make all of the money now?
2. What will I do with said money, if gotten?
3. Am I doing this out of a feeling of ineptitude and low esteem?
4. What is it about me that makes me think I can trick everyone and beat the market?
5. Do I deserve the money?

Have a pleasant weekend.