Forget about the infantile nature of this guy’s self absorption. He’s literally ruining the football season for his entire team. If he wanted to protest, he should’ve done it away from the team. But because he’s a selfish bastard and it’s all about him and his statements and what he believes in, he’s wearing pig cop socks today.
Didn’t they teach him as a kid, there’s no I in team?
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The negative ISM numbers, at first cute and funny, have begun to take their toll on investors and stocks are in pullback mode.
The Dow is off more than 80 and WTI is down 2%.
Gold is bouncing after a 2 week slump, indicative of a possible dovish Fed coming out on the other end of an economy that is apparently contracting.
The last negative ISM number was in February of 2016, when the world was ending. Granted, March ended up being a surreal time to invest, all built upon a foundation of sand. The premise being, a bad economy equates to more central bank rigging and a potential for reflation. This, of course, hasn’t materialized, as WTI dives lower into the low $40s again.
Also, let’s not ignore the construction numbers that came out today, a true harbinger of doom.
It’s also worth pointing out that Donald Trump is now up by 1% in the latest Rasmussen poll. He is the biggest threat to the globalist oligarchy since Reagan. It’s not a secret that Wall Street prefers Hillary, as corrupt people are inherently corruptible. Plus, she’s the status quo and that’s good for people with wealth. A Trump presidency throws everything into a fucking blender and turns that fucker on high.
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The August ISM manufacturer numbers were just what the Fed needed to avoid having to hike rates. Look at these numbers, they’re deliciously abysmal.
10:00 | ECONX
August ISM Manufacturing 49.4 vs 52.2 Briefing.com consensus; July 52.6
10:00 | ECONX
July Construction Spending M/M 0.0% vs +0.6% Briefing.com consensus
Construction numbers were off big too. What ever will we do?
Via Briefing.com
The key takeaway from the report is that it plants a negative seed for third quarter GDP growth prospects and also supports the notion held by many market participants that the Federal Reserve should refrain from raising the fed funds rate at this month’s FOMC meeting.
The August reading is the first reading below 50.0 since February 2016 and it was driven by a downturn in every component index, with the exception of new exports orders, which was unchanged at 52.5.
The key indexes of new orders (49.1 from 56.9), production (to 49.6 from 55.4), employment (to 48.3 from 49.4), and backlog of orders (to 45.5 from 48.0) were all below 50.0.
The Prices Index (to 53.0 from 55.0) remained above 50.0, but still reflected a deceleration in price increases versus July.
Of the 18 manufacturing industries covered by the report, only six reported an increase in new orders in August.
Isn’t convenient for these numbers to present themselves to us now? Ever since these shit throwing numbers came out, markets have firmed, even oil. I suppose, a really crappy economy equals more market rigging. Why not? Seems like moar fun.
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WTI is off by another 1.5% this morning and dropping fast. There are desperate reports that Saudi Arabia is seeking to convince OPEC to freeze production, in order to boost the value of soon to come public Saudi Aramco. However, the Iranians aren’t onboard and generally tell the Sauds to fuck themselves.
I wouldn’t trade anything ahead of tomorrow’s jobs report. Keep an eye on over leveraged garbage stocks for a barometer of the oil sector: WLL, CLR, CHK, OAS.
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The communists in China are the worst casino operators ever. In 2014, the government cracked down hard on corruption and grifters, causing Macau gaming revenues to plunge by mid 30% range.
After years of horrible numbers, finally, Macau posted a positive growth number, which is causing the stocks of casinos to surge.
Macau Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau reported August gross gaming rev +1.1% YoY to 18.84 bln patacas ($2.36 bln) vs -35.5% in Aug 2015 and -4.5% last month. GGR is down 9.1% YTD. Gross gaming rev peaked in 2014 and fell 34.3% in 2015 after the Chinese govt cracked down on money laundering in Macau. Estimates call for a ~low double digit decline this year.
If in fact Macau gaming is back, then shares of WYNN, MPEL and others are going to skyrocket.
Here is the casino sector in Exodus and its returns over the past two years.
The companies with heavy exposure to Macau have been halved since then. Lots of potential upside.
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In a fiery speech given in Arizona tonight, Trump reiterated his stance on immigration, which includes a wall that Mexico will pay for. More than that, Trump laid into the infirmed democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, saying we’re going to enforce the laws of illegal immigrants who’ve evaded justice, just like Hillary Clinton has evaded justice.’
Pardon the fucking graphics on this video, for it was being recorded by an infantile mental asylum patient.
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I must admit that I was surprised to learn that 90% of the people in the trending news department were liberally biased. That’s almost cult-like numbers. Having never used Facebook for news or given a shit about what the Zuckerberg network had to say about the world, I can comfortably say that I would not miss this product if it were phased out.
From every article I’ve read about the news algos and curation, it’s 100% shit.
This former ‘curator’ confirms my suspicions.
Source: Digiday
Were trending topics “biased?”
I wouldn’t say that it was a systemic problem with biases per se, but there were things in that Gizmodo article that were accurate. Ninety percent of the team identified as liberal, including the copy editors, who essentially had the final approval on topics. If a source came up that may have been less credible to a liberal reviewer — like Breitbart or another publication like that — it would require more extensive secondary sourcing. However, if there was an article that came from a more liberal-slanted publication, it was essentially given less critique and was a more viable topic from the get-go.
Did anything change once the article came out?
Facebook actually put more checks in place to make sure that that wouldn’t happen. And it did kind of stop. They balanced it out in that those liberal publications came under more scrutiny. If there was a topic that could potentially be biased, they would require more eyeballs on it. They made changes to the algorithm itself, so less credible topics wouldn’t pop up into the feed. People paid a lot more attention. The writing style also got drier. Any headline with loaded adjectives, like ‘Hillary Clinton attacked for emails’ or something like that, they were more focused on changing the verbiage.
Was anything exaggerated?
There were things that were bullshit, like how they said we weren’t treated like other Facebook employees. That’s not true, we were treated like anybody else. We could go to the happy hours, participate in the events, people talked with us in the office. We weren’t tucked away in some corner. We got three free meals. But my biggest problem was that while all these perks were great, they pampered us into complacency.
What do you mean?
Most newsrooms have discussions about what’s going on. You don’t just sit on your computer and write with your headphones on all day. When we were on these topics, and I had a question or wanted to get an editor’s opinion, I always felt like I was bothering them. The push toward quotas and producing content didn’t allow for that. You never felt like you were able to voice any considerations. Like, for instance, there were problems with the tool’s tagging feature. There were pre-set keywords, but they were sometimes inaccurate and wrong, and there was nowhere for us to voice that these topics were insufficient.
Was this symptomatic of a bigger issue of communication problems between the trending team and Facebook’s broader culture?
It never seemed like anyone in the company ever actually understood what we did or understand how the topics were curated. There were times when another team was working with a client and they happened to be trending, and they would ask if we could add a video or something because the client expected that. They didn’t get that it would mean breaking that wall between editorial and business. We would sometimes end up acquiescing to their requests and adding that video, and I just felt like that broke journalism ethics.
Wait, sales could influence trending topics?
No. Sometimes we’d get a request saying, “Hey, our client did this and it isn’t trending, can we make it trend?” And the answer for that would be, no, because that’s not how the algorithm worked. You couldn’t just inject a topic after the Gizmodo article came out. In the past, we had the ability to inject news topics, but I didn’t see it happen with any sales requests. The requests we got from them were more like if a topic was already trending, and there was related media or articles, they would request that we add that. But I still felt like that was a break of journalism ethics.
Can an editorial function live within Facebook?
You would essentially have to have them be a completely independent team, where they had full control over the editorial process and didn’t have to answer to anybody at Facebook. It would have to function like a newsroom. Had that gap existed between editorial and the rest of the company, it would have been a more legitimate product. We never felt the support of Facebook behind the product. It was just a little tab, you couldn’t go anywhere, like facebook.com/trending, where you could read all these topics in a feed.
Did that make you feel disposable?
Yes, I expected that we were going to get laid off and had already started applying elsewhere about a month and a half ago. You know how it looks like now? With just a simplified topic and the number of people talking about it? We saw that before anybody else did, and a few of us put two and two together and figured that it was probably how it was going to look like; otherwise, they wouldn’t be testing it on Facebook employees.
So the purpose of the trending team was just to teach the algorithm how to eventually filter the news itself?
I would like to believe that, because that would mean that we actually served a purpose and did something good. But if you’ve used the tool in the last few days, you’d realize that the algorithm didn’t learn shit. The topics are just wrong — they have bad articles and insufficient sources. I think they are just going to get rid of the product altogether, because there is going to be backlash when people who do use the tool realize that the quality has gone down — unless there are severe algorithmic changes that improve the quality of the topics.
These politicians don’t give a shit about the BLM movement, only as far as it will provide them with enough divisive campaigning to win elections. This is a memo from DCCC staffer Troy Perry, who has since resigned from his fucktarded role there in order to help get Hillary Clinton elected.
There are certain ways to talk to a BLM person, none of which should ever mention ‘black on black crime.’ That shit is atomic level hot sauce with no chaser and is sure to get a nice lad or lass from the Democratic party into a world of media hurt.
Oh, and never say ‘all lives matter.’ That’ll really piss them the fuck off and cause them to descend upon you in a savage manner.
source: Guccifer
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I am going to challenge Cramer’s thesis here, featured in the video below, that the market is insane for following oil lower and that a drop in oil isn’t truly a harbinger of poor economic output anymore because, well umm, technical innovation is causing people to use less crude. My core concern for a sharply lower stock market was never predicated around a pure economic downturn, but a bursting of a gigantic, cataclysmic, trillion dollar energy bubble that was built on the backs of much higher oil prices. I don’t give a shit if companies, like Cramer suggested, have found ways to drill oil cheaply, when the issue here is tied to debt loads and sovereign government that cannot survive or refinance their debt at $40 crude.
If we were to take Cramer’s pollyanna view of energy seriously and suggest that technological innovation is truly advancing at a pace that will decoupled economic output from crude consumption numbers, then our friends in the middle east and the wide swath of energy companies with gigantic debt loads out there are far more doomed than even I previously expected.
They will drill as much and as fast as possible, selling at any price, knowing that prices are heading lower–due to a sweeping drop in demand. It will be like one gigantic margin call where Quatar, Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Russia and American oil conglomerates all throw oil at the markets at once, in order to unload inventory.
Prices will crash. Banks will get severely ruined. Markets will drop. Economic activity will grind to a halt. The end.
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I’ve seen this company do this for the past decade and always come out ahead, at the end of the proverbial day. Alongside TEAM, CRM is the best publicly traded software company on the market. But tonight’s earnings were a little soft, in terms of guidance, so investors are bailing on the stock–sending it lower by 8%.
If I’m a long term investor of CRM, there’s no way I am selling on this tepid guide down in guidance. Year to date, the stock is flat for the year, but higher by 17% over the past 6 months.
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