Australia’s $90 Billion Soverign Wealth Fund Ups Cash Position to 25%

This beer swillers from down under are too busy playing with the kangaroos than to manage money in this market.

Australia’s sovereign wealth fund is famous for investing like cowards. They’ve doubled the fund since 2006 by attaining a pathetic 7% annual return by practicing a conservative form of investing.

That conservatism just went nuclear bomb shelter 25% cash, waiting for the fucking planet to tilt and then explode.

“We see prospective returns on risk at a lower level than in the immediate past years,” said Peter Costello, chairman of the fund and the nation’s former treasurer. “We are also conscious that monetary authorities, having stimulated so much, have less flexibility now to respond to future weakness. Given this, we have less risk in the Future Fund than we would under more normal circumstances.”

The pitch is simple.

Give us $100 million to sell short a stock that we will first publish on our blog, effectively guaranteeing any early investors an instant profit.

“We raised a meaningful amount of capital (in) a very short timeframe, so clearly we struck a chord within the alternatives community,” Adrangi wrote in an email to investors Wednesday reviewed by Reuters.
“We’ve taken a company that’s worth north of $10 (billion), and we’ve endeavored to get everyone to understand the insights we have about it,” Adrangi added in the note.

Kerrisdale is one of the many bearshitter websites that go spastic frenzied against a singular stock, issuing scathing reports that scare the shit out of longs and draw in a cadre of blood sucking vampires to pile in short upon seeing their reports. The result is usually a sharply lower share price on the day the report is published, which, by extension, is a round about way to front run.

This special short idea will be unveiled in May, at which time all of the capital would’ve been allocated towards seeing its decline, naturally.

Is AMD back? Does it matter at this point, seeing that INTC had humiliated them over the past decade?

Nevertheless, these numbers out tonight are very impressive and should propel the stock, in a significant way, tomorrow and beyond.

• Reports Q1 (Mar) loss of $0.12 per share, excluding non-recurring items, $0.01 better than the Capital IQ Consensus of ($0.13); revenues fell 19.2% year/year to $832 mln vs the $818.41 mln Capital IQ Consensus.
• Gross margin of 32 percent, up 2 percentage points sequentially, due primarily to a richer product mix and the mix of revenue between business segments.

Margins up, big top and bottom line beats. On top of that, the company just guided up in a big way.

Advanced Micro sees Q2 rev +12-18% QoQ to ~$932-982 mln vs $889.66 mln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate 

AMD is higher by 20% in the after-hours at a fresh 52 week high.

The competition in the swill sector has taken its toll on the firebrand Sam Adams Brewing company. While the disgusting beer over at BUD continues to sell like hot-cakes, the halfway decent beer at SAM is under significant pressure by the thousands of innovative and aggressive craft beer operators.

Via Briefing.com

• Reports Q1 (Mar) earnings of $0.53 per share, $0.44 worse than the Capital IQ Consensus of $0.97; revenues fell 5.4% year/year to $188.8 mln vs the $198.15 mln Capital IQ Consensus, due to a decline in core shipments of 6%, partially offset by price increases.
• Co issues downside guidance for FY16, sees EPS of $6.50-7.30 vs. $7.83 Capital IQ Consensus Estimate.
• Underlying the Company’s current 2016 projection are the following 53-week full-year estimates and targets:
  • Depletions and shipments percentage change at between minus 4% and plus 2%.
  • Price increases of between 1% and 2%. Gross margin of between 51% and 53%.
  • Increased investment in advertising, promotional and selling expenses of between zero and $10 million, a decrease from the previously communicated estimate of between $10 million and $20 million.
  • Estimated capital spending of between $50 million and $70 million, which will be mostly spent in our breweries to support future growth and product innovation and to drive efficiencies and cost reductions.
• “We believe Samuel Adams has lost share due to the increased competition and continued growth of drinker interest in variety and innovation. During the quarter, we rolled out new beers, including Samuel Adams Nitro White Ale, Samuel Adams Nitro IPA, Samuel Adams Nitro Coffee Stout and Samuel Adams Rebel Grapefruit IPA. These beers have started slowly, but their momentum continues to build. We believe that we are well positioned to meet the longer term challenges of this competitive environment, through the quality of our beers, our innovation capability and our sales execution strength, coupled with our strong financial position that enables us to invest in growing our brands.”

The stock is down 8% in the after-hours session.

Alphabet is diving lower by 6% in the aftet-hours on an earnings shortfall, on both the top and bottom line.

Q1 $7.50 vs $7.96 Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; revs $20.26 bln vs $20.38 bln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate

MSFT is lower by 4% on an earnings miss too.

Microsoft prelim Q3 $0.62 vs $0.64 Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; revs $22.08 bln vs $22.11 bln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate

To top off the trifecta, SBUX is down 3.5% on a revenue shortfall.

Starbucks prelim Q2 $0.39 vs $0.39 Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; revs $4.99 bln vs $5.03 bln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate

All three of these stocks were priced to perfection. It’s not a surprise to see these stocks trade down on any sign of weakness. Let’s see if the conference calls can firm up the price action.

NOTE: Visa missed as well and is slightly lower in after-hours. The company cited material weakness in emerging markets.

When you spend 50k per annum to educate a child, one would expect the institution that is receiving such monies to have the common courtesy to explain to their students the virtues of western society and why we’ve thrived above all over the past two thousand years.

A petition was set out to reinstall Western Society courses and Stanford and it was vilified to a degree that would make any hard-nosed dictator or fascist throughout history beam with pride.

I am sure there are several of you who will support the insanity by the illiberal left at Stanford, who, if given to their own biases, would have their heads cut off by the very people they endeavor to empower. Nothing about the current fringe element of the left is liberal. It’s the exact opposite. These people are intolerant, snap-chatting, morons, who scream and yell all day long about the evils of western society, while at the same time ignore the abhorrent behavior and lack of rights by inferior societies abroad. They ignore the fact that women are treated less than dogs in these societies and instead point towards wage disparities and other gender gaps that need fixing here. While western societies aren’t perfect and have many flaws, they are, by far, superior in all aspects to eastern societies– who are intolerant, bigoted and racist like you would not believe.

We’re reading a lot of headlines these days about ‘the first time this has happened since 2008’, yet markets are needling all time highs. In a report out by Moody’s, analyzing the credit downgrades of investment grade paper, the firm cites an alarming number of high quality paper being downgraded. The rate of decline from which companies lost investment grade status had, hitherto, not been seen since the dark days of 2008.

Moody’s is anticipating a further denigration of credit to continue in the not-so-distant future.

Last quarter, a total of 34 companies moved into that so-called crossover zone, for a total of 72 as of March 31. Of those, 59 are potential fallen angels (rated Baa3 on review for downgrade or with a negative outlook) compared with only 13 potential “rising stars” (Ba1 on review for upgrade or with a positive outlook).

Listed among the potential fallen angels are Barrick Gold Corp., Noble Energy Inc. and Ambev SA, the only Brazilian issuer that retains an investment-grade rating, according to Moody’s. Lear Corp. is among the potential rising stars.

Total debt for those potential fallen angels was $265 billion as of March 31, with non-U.S. issuers representing 80 percent of the total, Moody’s said. That’s up from $234 billion at the close of 2015.

None of this can take away from the profits enjoyed by market participants over the past two months. However, and most importantly, it’s paramount that you remember recent history and how a small crisis can easily bubble over into something much larger.

After starting 2008 with a 6% decline, markets rallied, in a ferocious manner, up until June of that year before succumbing to a selling frenzy that will be remembered forever, as a thing of legend. The odds of predicting another crisis to the exact month or week is extremely low. Nonetheless, we are seeing a repetition of warning signs, almost like a carbon copy from 2008, that demands attention. Otherwise, we’re nothing more than a class of morons–unable to learn from one’s history.

Finally someone had the balls to call out the absurdity of replacing President Jackson with Harriet Tubman.

Naturally, that person, aside from yours truly, is Donald Trump.

He calls the move “pure political correctness” and said he’d scrap plans to have Jackson removed. Moreover, he suggested that Tubman could be placed on a $2 bill instead.

The whole idea of fucking with the money is a giant waste of time. Instead of trying to brainwash people by shaming them into believing that America is this awful racist and divisive place, the fucking treasury should be trying to figure out ways to pay down the $20 trillion debt load. Otherwise, the Tubman $20s, after inflation, will have the purchasing power of confederate bill (pun intended).

This is wonderfully ironic. The Germans are livid over Draghi’s insane monetary policy, which is causing issues for Europe’s largest economy.

In testimony today, ECB chief, Super Mario Draghi, told Germany to buzz off and to obey.

“We have a mandate to pursue price stability for the whole of the euro zone not only for Germany,” he told a news conference.

“We obey the law, not the politicians, because we are independent as stated by the law.”

The comments came after German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble sharply attacked ECB policies, arguing they were causing “extraordinary” problems for Germany and were in part to blame for the rise of the right-wing anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Draghi repeatedly stressed that inflation remained far off the bank’s target of near two percent and argued that the euro zone economy still faced a cocktail of external risks and would be in a worse state today had the ECB not resorted to negative interest rates to accompany a 1.7 trillion euro ($1.92 billion) money-printing scheme.

“Our policies work, they are effective. Just give them time to fully display their effects,” he said. “Global uncertainties persist. Looking forward, it is essential to preserve an appropriate degree of monetary accommodation as long as needed.”

He said the bank would begin buying corporate bonds as part of its quantitative easing policy in June.

Acting to halt speculation that he was entertaining the prospect of so-called “helicopter money” — handing money directly to the public — to kickstart the economy, Draghi stated the bank had not discussed that option.

European markets are lower, across the board. I guess those degenerates really wanted some helicopter money. The schism between Germany v the bankrupted in Europe will be something to watch. Up until a few years ago, Germany seemed to be setting policy for the ECB. But ever since the Greek crisis and subsequent market scares, German austerity has been shelved. Replacing it is a form of monetary easing and degeneracy that would make any Austrian economist cringe.

I can talk about this topic all day. Vox sums up the current cabal of lunatic liberals, who’ve abandoned their principles and the people who supported them in favor of a smug, globalist, elitist agenda that reeks with fascist dictorial condescension.

This.

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The rubes noticed and replied in kind. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The blue collar white middle class factory worker is voting GOP in overwhelming large numbers now–because the liberal establishment made a concerted effort to undermine him, in order to curry the favor of a more appealing, faster growing, demographic.

This will, inexorably, blow up in their faces.

The article is linked above. It is a must read.