Cramer Has Faith in Yellen to Do the Right Thing

Cramer thinks all rallies in oil should be sold, citing today’s clownishly high crude inventory build of 11 million barrels of oil. Also, he believes in the good grandmother, Janet Yellen, and her ability to empathize with main street, suggesting the Fed will strike a more dovish tone tomorrow.

He’s waiting for a fucking greenlight from a ridiculous Federal Reserve. It’s ridiculous, really.

You have to admit, Wall Street has done everything is can to change the path of the Fed. They’ve taken out all the guns and have been conducting a full scale propaganda campaign against further rate hikes for the past two weeks. Let’s see if the Fed bends the knee or stubbornly stays the course to annihilation.

Former Lehman analyst, Dan Niles, is hating on Apple’s quarter, citing a number of metrics that could mean trouble for the Tim Cook led company in the coming quarters. He even went as far as to compare it to RIMM.

Apple missed on iPhone and MAC estimates, dropping the ball and clowning themselves on iPad sales.

The stock is now lower in after hours, by 2.5%.

Steve Jobs would cut Tim Cook’s dick off for missing on so many metrics. Nonetheless, it wasn’t the catastrophe that so many drama queens in the market predicted it would be.

Reports Q1 (Dec) earnings of $3.28 per share, $0.05 better than the Capital IQ Consensus of $3.23; revenues rose 1.7% year/year to $75.87 bln vs the $76.6 bln Capital IQ Consensus; gross margin of 40.1% vs 39.9% ests and 39.9% last year (guidance 39-40%).
iPhones 74.8 mln vs 76.2 mln ests vs 74.5 mln last year.
iPads 16.1 mln vs 19.1 mln ests vs 21.4 mln last year
Macs 5.3 mln vs 5.7 mln ests 5.5 mln last year.
Co issues downside guidance for Q2, sees Q2 revs of $50-53 bln vs. $55.38 bln Capital IQ Consensus; gross margins of 39.0-39.5% vs 40.0% ests and 40.8% last year.

Q1 iPhones 74.8 mln vs 76.2 mln ests vs 74.5 mln last year.
Q1 iPads 16.1 mln vs 19.1 mln ests vs 21.4 mln last year
Q1 Macs 5.3 mln vs 5.7 mln ests 5.5 mln last year.

Apple prelim Q1 $3.28 vs $3.23 Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; revs $75.9 bln vs $76.60 bln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; sees Q2 rev $50-53 bln vs. $55.38 bln consensus

The stock is moving higher in the after hours.

This guide down is the first since 2003. Tim Cook is reportedly still gay and actively dating.

I bet the lot of you enjoyed today’s rally. You wore Dow 16,000 caps and devoured cheesed doodles while watching your favorite stocks trade up.

Back in the days of Noah, there were sunny days, very pleasant days, yet the production of the ark continued. He didn’t loaf about the tree stump, watching wildlife frolic in the woods. He collected animals, plants, and select human beings–to live on his ark, for the preservation of mankind. When the floods came shuffling down, Noah and his fucking zebras had the last laugh.

As all of the sinners drowned in the briney waters of God’s tears, Noah’s goats ate leaves FROM THE TREES NOAH SAVED AND PUT ON HIS ARK.

I present the intraday action of TLT.

The good news is stocks were up. The bad news is, as indicated by TLT aka”the ark”, the floods are still coming.

I love negative feedback loops. They are self fulfilling prophecies and there is nothing you can do to stop them.

JP Morgan cut its price target for the S&P by 9%, on earnings of $120, to 2,000–which is actually a 6.5% gain from current levels.

However, the tone of the note led me to believe they’re really piling onto the “fuck the Fed’ bandwagon that Wall Street is promoting now, attempting to shape policy to be more conciliatory towards a very easy monetary policy.

“There is increasing risk that elevated volatility starts incurring enough technical damage to market psychology,” a team led by Lakos-Bujas wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. That could spill over and negatively affect business and consumer sentiment, “resulting in a lack of risk taking, and eventually creating a negative feedback loop into the real economy.”

“While in the short term an expected pickup in buyback activity and positive fourth-quarter earnings surprises may provide some support to equities,” the team wrote, “absent a positive central bank catalyst, we see equity risks skewed to the downside over the medium term.”

The JPMorgan team also said the S&P 500 is likely to post two straight years of flat to negative earnings growth, as the “risk of earnings recession is rising.

There is nothing to do or say. The negative feedback loop is like a black hole of doom barreling towards your farmhouse. Next thing you know, you’re consumed by it and life as you know it sucks.

Investment grade spreads to U.S. Treasuries are now pricing in recession. As a matter of fact, the spreads are now higher than 4 out of the past 5 recessions.

Why?

Because people are boarding the ark, afraid of the dangers that lie ahead.

This is a very classic trade, one that is taught in every business school around the world. If you believe an economic contraction is around the bend, buy treasuries.

“There is a lot of value out there,” said Stephen Antczak, head of credit strategy at Citigroup. The reaction in corporate bonds “has been so drastic and so violent — above and beyond what the fundamentals and even the extreme volatility should dictate,” said Antczak, who in 2007 as a high-yield strategist at UBS AG recommended reducing holdings of risky corporate debt.

U.S. corporate bonds have lost 0.312 percent so far this year, the worst start to a year in 16. Borrowing costs for investment-grade companies have soared to a four-year high as Standard & Poor’s warned that the outlook for corporate borrowers worldwide was the worst since 2009.

Recession Worries

The risk premium on the Markit CDX North American Investment Grade Yield Index, a credit-default swaps benchmark tied to the debt of 100 of the safest companies, surged to 112.47 basis points, the most in more than three years. A similar measure for junk debt is at the highest mark since 2012.

There’s still plenty of concern that these signs are pointing to an increased chance of recession, according to Bonnie Baha, who helps oversee $80 billion at DoubleLine Capital. “We have seen a ton of borrowing that doesn’t generate revenue,” said Baha. “At some point that becomes very deflationary. And then you have to worry more about the preservation of your capital than finding value.”

Baha said that DoubleLine has reduced its holdings of investment-grade bonds in recent months.

Buy Credit

At Vanguard Group Inc., Gregory Nassour, principal and co-head of investment-grade portfolio management, is starting to buy some of those bonds. “Credit is weaker than it has been, but not everything is all bad. There are still things to buy,” Nassour said. “You are seeing a lot of volatility, you will see a lot more ebb and flow, but it’s not the end of the world.”

While commodities-related issuers have suffered the most, fears of a meltdown has also spread to other sectors. And that’s where some of the best buys are for Mark Kiesel, the chief investment officer for global credit at Pimco.

Kiesel said he favors sectors like consumer goods, housing, health care, pharmaceuticals and building materials, which have been beaten down along with commodities-related issuers and emerging markets as investors fret about a slowdown in global growth. Consumer-sector debt is down 0.5 percent in the past two weeks, with brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Heinz Co. among the worst performers in the sector.

‘Bottom Line’

“The bottom line is that the U.S. consumer is almost 70 percent of the U.S. economy and we don’t see a U.S. recession this year,” Kiesel said in an e-mail. “Yet the credit markets are increasingly ‘pricing in’ a higher chance of recession, which is where the opportunity is. We want to stay ‘high quality’ and favor U.S. consumer-oriented sectors.”

“You still have to brush your teeth, wash your hair, eat and drink, and companies in those sectors have weakened along with everything else,” said Jim Caron, a managing director at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, which oversees $406 billion. “The market is pricing in a recession that when you look at fundamentals looks increasingly unlikely, and there is a whole grocery store of things that look cheaper than they ought to be.”

If take a step back and think about the scale and magnitude of the Janet Yellen Fed fuck up, it’s astounding. She has single handedly caused hundreds of billions in losses, forced investment grade spreads to blow out v treasuries and haas done nothing to remedy the situation, after having the benefit of seeing her disastrous results.

It will be interesting to see what the Fed says tomorrow.

Crude is forklifting higher right now, with Brent higher by 3%–so biotechs get hammered? I know there is little relation between biotech stocks and oil. But with the market up nearly 250 and the SPY higher by 1.2%, this has to be a supreme disappointment to all of the doctors who fancy themselves to be astute investors, as the medicine man stocks get hammered for 2%.

This is the ultimate risk on asset, so seeing them lower is a bit of a Debbie Downer.

Downside pin action can be found in NBIX, ANAC, JUNO, RARE, ICPT, AGIO, PRTA, MDVN, INCY and many others.

For the year, biotech stocks have been one of the worst performers, down more than 22%. Over the past six months, the sector is down 41%.

Every single thing this man has touched, since his great housing collapse hit in 2008, has turned into salt. It’s amazing, actually. Believe it or not, he’s actually long Puerto Rico now. It almost reminds me of that old movie with Richard Pryor where his task was to lose a fortune in order to inherit a larger one, only in this case Paulson is successful in losing the larger one.

He’s now putting up his personal fortune to support his funds credit line. His fund has been halved since 2009.

According to Exodus, his top holdings are AGN, VRX, TWC and GRFS. His year to date losses are in the 15% range.

Cramer and Faber were discussing this topic today (by the way, this is my favorite CNBC show of the day, a clownless Cramer and sharp Faber) and I agree 100%. The market can get great earnings reports from leading companies, oversold market conditions can persist, and pretty good economic data could be released– and it would mean nothing, unless the Fed, China and Oil cooperate with the long thesis.

In order for this market to rally and hold its gains, we need the Fed to back off, China to stabilize and oil needs to go up. Forget about oil stabilizing. That’s horseshit. It needs to trade up to $40-$50 asap.

This market isn’t for old men. Straight away this morning, many of you jumped headlong into the market, after seeing futures reverse to the upside.

However, Mother Market might have different plans in store, insidious ones. I’m now in the process of removing myself from the market. I’ll be out of SPY by 2/2 and with a very token position after tomorrow.

While it’s true, the bounce in crude and non disaster in FCX are encouraging signs for a bounce, I’m not interested in gambling now. With history as my guide, stocks are poised for another leg lower in February. If we can’t rally this week, we’ll never rally again.