Trump Rips Boeing for Expensive Air Force 1 Project; Idiots Run Wild Throwing Shit at the Computer

Now that I’ve been blogging about political stuff, I have exposure to many non finance channels and get to see what these political types say about finance, most of which is wrought with abject ignorance of the 8th grade varietal.

Earlier today, Trump tweeted that Boeing’s Air Force 1 project had run too long and was too expensive, saying it cost upwards of $4b and that he wanted to cancel the order.

Trump claims new Air Force One "out of control": "We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money." https://t.co/pSI7kxR3uH pic.twitter.com/73qk508UA5

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) December 6, 2016

I suppose as President of the United States, he’s both entitled to discuss what he believes to be unfair treatment of American tax dollars and also to apply pressure to Boeing for doing such a shitty job. The whole thing reminded me of the movie The Aviator, with Howard Hughes being accused of war profiteering for building the ‘spruce goose.’

I’m 100% positive that if we peered into the defense contracts, we’d find a lot more than $4b in waste. But that’s not the point.

Everyone saw BA drop a little and were almost ebullient that the shares had dropped on the Trump tweet. What these idiots didn’t realize is Boeing does $95b in sales per annum. If they lost the contract, which they won’t, it wouldn’t meant a god damned thing to them.

On the left, people depicted Trump as a lunatic who’s running up expensive NYPD security bills on one hand, and on the other complaining about wasted tax payer dollars.

It’s not likely that Trump will hire a foreign manufacturer like Airbus for the project, so this is just posturing. The art of any deal is to apply pressure, offer a solution, close.

My best guess, Trump will use Boeing’s significant defense contracts as leverage to get a better Airforce 1 deal.

Calm the fuck down.

It’s over. There isn’t a fight between bulls and bears anymore, just bulls vs super bulls. The specter of even discussing today’s 2% drop in crude and making it out to be something that is important is like scratching a blackboard with long fingernails for me.

Look, no one wants the whole kit and kaboodle to implode and burn in the fires of vengeance more than me. But at some point, you either have to see things for what they are, or you start to act like a person who’s bordering on delusional. Crude stocks are up 29%, on a median basis, over the past month — according to Exodus. If said stocks pullback a little, what’s the big deal? This is stupid already.

We all know this is a gigantic bubble. We realize the Fed and other central banks rig the game in order to keep themselves afloat. So the fuck what?

For the entire year, I decompressed from 18 years of professional money management. I quit in December of 2015 — because I couldn’t take it any longer. I’ve focused all of my energy on building up iBankCoin again — propelling it to new heights. I had neglected the site throughout 2015 and traffic had plunged as a result. I didn’t trade in 2016 — because I wanted to only trade the Exodus OS signals, which have been entirely right. The only problem, at least for 2016, is they were very rare. We only had a handful of OS signals this year, much different from previous years — which made me bored and caused me to stray off the plantation.

Two things happened, as a result.

1. I found myself long gold as an investment, something I’d never do.
2. I started to short stocks — thinking markets would plunge after the elections.

I do not regret holding my $TLT position and not taking profits. In spite of the recent collapse, I’m still up and have received 2.5% in dividends throughout 2016.

Conclusion and solution: I’ll be locking in tax losses before the end of the year, most likely covering all shorts and selling my gold. During 2017, especially inside Exodus, I intend to take a much more active role in trading markets again and will play the long side, like I have in the past. Some of my long strategies have worked this year, such as my GARP portfolio, which I modeled to outperform in the event of a Trump win. It has done fantastic this year. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it’s in the mid double digits.

By 1/11/17, I will have around 75% cash and have a new strategy for tackling markets for the new year.

I was once a loyal patron at Chipotle. I’m a foodie and tend to eat out a lot. Being dragged around like a rag doll all the time in search of shopping experiences, I find myself in all sorts of shopping mall, usually adjacent to places like Chipotle. I can’t speak for any of you, but the reason why I haven’t eaten there since the tainted food scandal is because the company never revealed the source of the contaminants. It just popped up in random places and the company had no explanation, other than to say they were working diligently on resolving the issue.

It’s a shame, because the food was good. But, I’ll never eat there again. The brand has been tainted forever and it isn’t coming back. Same store sales have plunged in the order of 19% for the past year and management just warned at the Barclays Conference that they were nervous about hitting 2017 sales guidance.

A Bloomberg report, Shelly Banjo, was there and was live tweeting Chipotle’s comments.

This is not good: Chipotle says lines are back, but in some cases it's because throughput is down (once one of $CMG greatest assets)

— Shelly Banjo (@sbanjo) December 6, 2016

The stock is down about 5% now. The Bill Ackman curse lives on.

It’s the same reason why they’ve shrugged off a weaker than expected China, BREXIT, Trump, a once collapsing oil and gas industry, negative rates, and three-decade low productivity numbers: “they” don’t care.

Algorithms are fired up, locked and loaded to accumulate securities. The institutions have full control over the market. Once upon a time, individuals moved markets. Today, it’s all rigged by government intermingling, with the assistance of the banks who have endless cash reserves to disrupt markets, in addition to the stock buybacks enacted by corporations rich off globalization.

Slave factories are very profitable.

After the Italian referendum, which will lead to a new Italian government that is not friendly towards the EU, markets were expected to drop. The euro was lower by 1.5% and futures headed lower. Naturally, the dips were bought. The euro went up and only a handful of Italian banks traded down sharply. Remember the 2011 EU crisis, which was fomented by PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain)? Back then, even French yields were diverging from Germany. It was widely believed that the entire EU would collapse because Merkel wouldn’t backstop Greece. Well, that got resolved via Draghi and QE and markets have been happy ever since then.

But the Italian referendum is a huge game changer — one that the market isn’t taking seriously because the threat isn’t imminent.

Do the math. If the Five Star Movement takes power in Italy, you can kiss the EU goodbye. Italian banks will fail. German banks will eat the losses. Kiss your stocked market goodbye. Also, and let’s not forget, French elections are coming soon. Le Pen is ardently anti-EU and has a great chance of winning there.

But I guess we’ll deal with this during 2017.

Here’s a fool from Northern Trust trying to get his small brain around the whole scheme.

This punk never had a chance. He entered the lion’s den of a soft spoken man who systematically destroys his opponents in verbal combat — tearing them limb by limb until nothing is left. In this episode of ‘You Can’t Cuck the Tuck’, Tucker Carlson took on a meek, sub 100 IQ, college student who wants to ‘fire’ Gary Cohn from the Board of Trustees at American University — for meeting with Donald Trump. It’s worth noting, trustees aren’t hired, since, by definition, they’re big donors and subsidize student tuitions.

The tolerant and progressive students at American U have taken to campus to call for Cohn to step down, saying “We, the students of AU, will not let a man who endorses Donald Trump’s hateful agenda remain in a position of leadership at our University.”

One senior, Moira Nolan, said in an interview published by The Eagle “Cohn’s meeting with Trump is in complete conflict of interest with the University’s mission to promote a more inclusive campus.”

THIS IS YOUR FUTURE.

At first, I thought they were apron loafers or even tassel. But upon further inspection, it looks like Dennis Gartman appeared on CNBC this evening entirely sockless in penny loafers, made from cordovan leather.

“Damn straight I did.”

The loafer was introduced into American shoe cannon in the 1930’s, first called the ‘Aurland moccasin’. By the 1950’s, they were a significant part of stylish Anglican shoewear, specific to the northeast — and are commonly worn by fuckheads today in places like Nantucket and Martha’s Vinyard.

Mr. Gartman made what some might call a ‘faux pas’ — also known as a tactless display of fashion ignorance by sporting summer shoes in 40 degree NYC weather.

Notice how uncomfortable the Fast Money crew is around Dennis? Who could blame them?

A closer look at Gartman’s shoes.

His entire left leg is practically exposed here, due to a poor off the rack pair of slacks, coupled with feet, which are astonishingly bereft of socks.

At one point during the interview, whilst discussing crude oil and how Dennis thinks $52 is the top, Tim Seymour appears visibly shaken by Dennis’ shoes.

As you can see with this angle, his entire foot is hanging out of the shoe. Un-fucking-believable.

Here is the video of Dennis’ fashion faux pas, as well as meaningless banter about OPEC being dishonest and oil topping out at $52 — because of contango and other horseshit important to his incorrect way of thinking.

The producer of Fast Money, Amanda Diaz, has responded to this post.

@The_Real_Fly @iBankCoin4tw that's his signature look!

— Amanda Diaz (@cnbcdiaz) December 6, 2016

This is comical. The lunatics from Google, big donors to the Clinton Foundation and supporters of the Hillary campaign, are so out of tune with the rest of America — being domiciled in the People’s Republic of California, they’re in search of aggressive talent in order to reach out to the alien genre of conservative and libertarian Americans.

Chief Libtard at Google, Eric Schmidt

BEHOLD, the Google corporation is in search of a manager for their ‘Conservative Outreach and Public Policy‘ Department.

As a member of Google’s Public Policy team, you help shape various product and issue agendas with policy makers inside and outside government. In addition, you will help advise our internal teams on the public policy implications of their products, working with a closely coordinated and cross-functional global team. The role requires significant experience either working with or in government, politics or a regulatory agency as well as an ability to grasp complex technical and policy issues.

As a member of Google’s Public Policy outreach team, you will act as Google’s liaison to conservative, libertarian and free market groups. You are part organizer, part advocate and part policy wonk as you understand the world of third-party non-governmental advocacy organizations. You are eager to represent Google among those organizations. You can work a room, tell Google’s story in an elevator or from a podium and work with partner organizations on shared projects to advance Google’s public policy goals.

Manage Google’s partnerships with conservative, libertarian and free market third-party advocacy organizations, think tanks, and activists.

Represent Google externally at meetings and events held by advocacy organizations.

Organize programs and events to help advocacy organizations better understand Google’s products and services.

Meet regularly with organizations and work closely with groups on joint projects.

Google is one of the biggest lobbyists in Washington, having spent close to $12m in 2016 — placing them in the top 5 amongst US companies.  In a recent interview with the BBC, the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said “We need to figure out how to constructively engage with the new administration and hear the voices of people.”

During the election, co-founder, Eric Schmidt was seen with a Hillary Clinton staff badge, further cementing himself in the amber of leftist politics.

Morgan Stanley announced they’ll be changing their payout grid in 2017 — upping the level of production needed to attain the utterly ridiculous 32% commission share they’ve pulled out of their fucking asses.

As of now, a broker at Morgan Stanley needs to produce $220,000 in gross commissions — in order to retain a slap in the face — or 32% of what they produced. But in 2017, that same piker broker, albeit hard working and poor as shit, will need to produce $242,000.

Here is how the numbers work in the real world.

$220,000 at 32% payout = $70,400

But wait, there’s more!

From that $220k, one could assume a sundry of fees to be levied upon them. For the sake of brevity, let’s assume Morgan dings them around $1,000 per mo. Now you’re making $60,400 per annum.

At 25% Federal tax bracket, 5% state tax, social security, medicare, the low end Morgan Stanley broker will make around $38,000 take home per annum, or $3,200 per mo. That is poverty, literally.

Why in the world would anyone stay at Morgan when you could easily go independent and receive a 90% payout? Bear in mind, at an indie firm brokers will be under a 1099 schedule and will be able to write off many expenses — thereby lowering their tax burdens.

Alas, if you’re part of the elite club at Morgan, doing $5m or more in production per annum, you’ll still receive a payout ranging from 51.5% to 55.5%. Plus, you’ll get invited to annual golf matches and get to rub elbows with all of the wonderful C level execs at the firm.

These wirehouses are plantations for aspiring brokers and advisors. Avoid them like the plague.

If I told you a year ago that markets would soar after the U.K. would vote to leave the EU, the debt strapped Italy would vote to fire Renzi and pave the way to potentially exit the EU, and Trump would win the election on an anti China platform, you’d tell me to fuck off. Well, following yesterday’s Italian referendum and subsequent collapse of the entire Italian bank, that’s precisely what’s happening today.

Let’s draw some distinctions, shall we?

And…markets are at new highs.

Italian 10yr is ripping higher, up 13bps to 2.037%. In bizaaro world, spiking borrrowing costs for highly indebted nations is good news. Bankruptcy is so trendy.

In short, because Trump is such a friend to China, and inflation is such a threat, and the economy is doing so well, sharply higher interest rates is good for stocks. It transcends everything, even the potential collapse of Italy’s banking system and their exit from the EU.

To be clear, all that matters is global growth is somehow back with a vengeance.

Bill Ackman is a billionaire for a reason. While most of you mere millionaire spartan types struggle to keep up with the Joneses, Montauk Bill is constructing giant buildings and acquiring $100 million apartments as a matter of leisure and ‘fun.’

He takes gigantic positions in soon to be bankrupt biotech companies and shorts the shit out of stocks that soar. But none of that matters, for Bill is blessed by the Gods to continue his quest to collect billions of dollars and to make Pershing Square great again.

Thanks to his positions in FNMA, CP, APD and QSR, Ackman enjoyed a rather effervescent lift in November, climbing by 10% — cutting his losses in half for 2016. About $500m of the gains were propelled by Fannie Mae, all thanks to Trump. Also, his HLF short plunged 19%.

Bear in mind, 6 months ago, Bill was besieged in ruin. His fund was down 25%, following a horrendous 2015 (-20.5%). To be down just 10% for the year is truly evidence of the genius of Bill, a man who needs no introduction or assistance as it pertains to the art of professional money management.

Congrats to Bill for making it back and double congrats to clients of Pershing for only losing 10% this year and just -30% over the past two.