Snapchat Will Be Coming Public Soon at 30 Times Sales; Here Are Their New Retarded Sunglasses

For the love of God, I do not get Snapchat. My teenage son and his friends live on the app, rarely, if ever, bothering with Twitter. I’m finally old. I started blogging about stocks more than 10 years ago, when I was just 29. Now I’m 40 and my interests have switched from consuming large quantities of Monster Energy soda and slapping people in the faces with hot slices of pizza, to a more genteel living.

Although I am keenly aware of what these youngsters are doing, I am not obligated to like it.

Two things are for certain.

1. I will not be buying Snapchat’s IPO at 25-30x next years revenues.
2. I will not be buying their retarded sunglasses — featured in the video below.

We got our hands on Snapchat's elusive Spectacles https://t.co/GUKNqJ7e2L pic.twitter.com/qakeORGYR9

— Bloomberg (@business) December 2, 2016

For gold traders, it has been a long month of the ‘Trump-trade’ completely decimating their lives — disrupting their austere lifestyles with harrowing losses. In the shadow of soon to be great again America, gold stocks plummeted by more than 15% over the past month — knee capping an otherwise spoiled rotten investor base who’ve been enjoying magnanimous gains throughout 2016 — even though they’ve mostly done it under the pretext of waiting for an end of days scenario to unfold.

In addition to gold, bonds and anything defensive, like consumer staples, utilities and REITs got hammered — as Joe Blow blew his wad into high beta, psychotic energy, and aluminum stocks — gleefully and flippantly tossing money at bank stocks too because the yield curve blew out.

If only for today, the defensive plays are back in vogue, reminiscent of the days when the deflationary vortex reigned supreme and people, literally, feared for their lives and the future of their nation. Gold and silver stocks are higher by 4%, REITs by 2.5% Utilities by 1% and Goldman is down 1.6%.

Recent underperformers in the biotech space are participating in the rally — as a general malaise wistfully sweeps through Wall Street — exuberant about any and all best case scenarios. Traders, as always, are ignoring all of the negative aspects of sharply higher sovereign borrowing costs and an administration whose central campaign promise was to bring China to its knees — reversing decades of unfair currency manipulation and one sided trade deals. Judging by the sharp rise in basic materials, especially copper, none of that is being priced into stocks.

Once again, Trump is not being taken seriously.

If recent history is of any use, investors will soon learn about the seriousness of Trump’s policies and how upsetting the apple cart isn’t exactly a seamless transition into mindless rallies — based solely on hope.

Once upon a time, this stock nearly destroyed me. Some of you might recall the winter of 2014 when the Four Horsemen of certain death nearly killed me. It was the largest drawdown of my meaningless career and it was the turning point in my life that told me that I didn’t want to manage money anymore. For that, I’m eternally grateful to WDAY. All other aspects of the stock can fuck itself in the worst of ways.

The company is out with soft guidance in their conference call this morning, which is having an acrimonious effect on its shares. Amongst other things, these assclowns are blaming the elections and BREXIT for the softness.

Hello, BREXIT happened two quarters ago.

Via Briefing.com

Last night, WDAY beat Q3 estimates and raised FY17 guidance slightly.

However, during November, co saw slippage in a handful of large deals with multinationals delaying projects due to uncertainty (Brexit, elections), not a competitive issue — co is waiting to see how it plays out.

Co also guided for 30% sub rev growth next year (FY18) with sub billings growth in the mid 20s (below estimates) and margin improvement; low teens sub billings growth for Q1.

Tech has already been the weak spot in this market. This warning will not help sentiment for high valuation, high growth tech.

The morticians at Bank of America are so far ahead of everyone else, they’re planning for an end to a bull market that hasn’t even happened yet. This is financial cuckery at its finest. If I was running their division, I’d fire them on the spot for such shoddy analysis.

The bank is literally warning that the end of the bull market is at end, but we’re due for another 20% rip to the upside. Well, hell-fucking-oh, I don’t think anyone is planning for their divorce just before getting married.

souce: Bloomberg

Stocks have continued to hit new highs this year despite concerns over global growth, geopolitical events, and an earnings recession. That dissonance may be coming to an end as analysts at Bank of America Corp. predict we are approaching the market’s last hurrah. The crux of the argument is that the firm’s contrarian sell side indicator, which measures Wall Street’s bullishness on equities, jumped to a six-month high in November, its biggest gain in more than a year. Right now, the index is pointing toward a rally of almost 20 percent for U.S. stocks over the next 12-months, but the analysts believe that a rally of that magnitude could mark the end of the bull run.

“[T]he post-election bounce in Wall Street sentiment could be the first step toward the market euphoria that we typically see at the end of bull markets and that has been glaringly absent so far in the cycle,” a team led by Savita Subramanian, head of U.S. equity and quantitative strategy at the firm, wrote in a note Thursday.

“The Sell Side Indicator does not catch every rally or decline in the stock market, but the indicator has historically had some predictive capability with respect to subsequent 12-month S&P 500 total returns,” the bank said.

Bank of America analysts currently have a base case call for the S&P 500 to end 2017 at 2,300, or 5 percent above today’s levels. With this indicator taken into consideration when formulating their outlook, the team’s bull case scenario represents a rapid rise in stocks. “The case for a traditional euphoria-driven end-of-bull-market rally is easy to argue for, and 20 percent or greater annual returns are the historic norm, putting the S&P 500 at 2,700 in our bull case,” they conclude, adding that their bear case calls for stocks to end the year down 27 percent at 1,600.

In other words, because sentiment was so poor, stocks will trade higher — then they will top. Gee thanks for the value add. This is something the Option Addict has been preaching the entire year, and did so with great success. If you want real analysis without cuckery, attend the last iBC boot camp of the year — scheduled to start on 12/12/16.

According to Bloomberg, world equity markets gained $635b in market cap, while bonds lost $1.7t — leaving a deficit of more than $1 trillion since the election. Much of those losses were absorbed by foreign governments, the cucks participating in never ending QE schemes. The balance sheets of the ECB and Federal Reserve are looking much worse now than just one month ago.

source: Bloomberg

“The market has moved with remarkable swiftness to price in the anticipated reflationary impact of a Trump administration,” said Matthew Cairns, a strategist at Rabobank International in London. “This has, in turn, prompted a notable rotation out of fixed income and into equities.”

Still, Cairns cautioned the moves are “remarkable given the distinct lack of clarity as regards what policies the president-elect will actually pursue.”

November’s rout wiped a record $1.7 trillion from the global index’s value in a month that saw world equity markets’ capitalization climb $635 billion.

The yield on 10-year U.S. notes rose 56 basis points in November, the biggest jump since 2009, and was at 2.44 percent as of about 4 p.m. in New York, after reaching the highest since June 2015.

The average yield on the Bloomberg Barclays Global gauge climbed to 1.61 percent on Nov. 23, after touching a record low of 1.07 percent on July 5.

“A lot of people are beginning to think that it is the end of the bull rally,” said Roger Bridges, chief global strategist for interest rates and currencies in Sydney at Nikko Asset Management’s Australia unit, which oversees $14 billion. U.S. 10-year yields may rise to 2.7 percent in January, Bridges said.

I think it’s important to remind people that the stock market has been soaring on the hopes of rapid GDP growth under Trump — who promised to build all sorts of stuff — walls, tunnels, bridges etc. What people don’t seem to grasp, unfortunately, is that in order to fund these projects the government needs to tap the bond markets. The 10yr bond yield has risen from 1.75% to 2.44% over the past month. The cost to service the national debt has skyrocketed — making it increasingly difficult to enact ambitious fiscal stimulus.

Couple that with the break-neck gains in the dollar, especially against our chief trading rivals (+14% v yen over the past month), and one can easily paint a picture that all of the recent grandeur in equity markets has only served to ingratiate the wealthiest in the country and have hampered the specter of any real fundamental change, via fiscal stimulus, promised by Trump — which is central to his platform.

Initially, everything melted up — in what could only be described as a post Trump short squeeze for the ages. The most significant gains have been found in construction and material stocks — up anywhere from 15-40% since November 8th. Second to the materials are the banks. Contrary to what the cucked media is saying, the banks aren’t going up because Trump is secretly a Wall Street shill. The banks are going up for one simple reason: the yield curve has steepened from 80bps to 129bps. For a banker, that spread is pure profit.

While the gains enjoyed by these sectors steal the headlines, I think it’s important to take note of the broad market cap gains across the biggest sectors, in order to assess a true and pure analysis of the gains.

Sector/Collective Mkt Cap/1mo Return

Drugs – Major/2.1t/+1.8%
Major Oil/1.68t/+6.5%
Internet Info providers/1.57t/+1.88%
Money Center Banks/1.38t/+17.5%
Chinese Burritos/1.3t/-1.1%
App Software/1t/-0.16%
Conglomerates/965b/+6%

In short, if you weren’t long a bunch of banks or oil stocks over the past month, your portfolios marked time. As a point in fact, out of $10 trillion in market capitalization in the aforementioned sectors, just $4 trillion of them enjoyed gains more than 2%.

The biggest losses were endured in gold and foreign utilities (currency fuckery), down 16.5% and 15.9%, respectively.

Over the past two weeks, the rotation and dichotomy of the market was much more pronounced.

Sector/Collective Mkt Cap/2 week Return

Drugs – Major/2.1t/-4.1%
Major Oil/1.68t/+5.9%
Internet Info providers/1.57t/-2.3%
Money Center Banks/1.38t/+3.4%
Chinese Burritos/1.3t/-1.25%%
App Software/1t/-2.4%
Conglomerates/965b/+1%

The biggest losses were endured in shipping and biotech, down 9.7% and 7.8%, respectively.

Not too healthy, eh? The market isn’t a zero sum game. Gains are merely transferring from one sector to the next — frustrating momentum traders with classic misdirection.

It’s also worth noting, the biggest market of all, the bond market, has been ravaged — with losses in TLT at 9.3% over the past month and -2% over the past two weeks.

If the muni market is telling us anything, it’s that a great doom is just around the bend. Back in November of 2008, munis dropped by about 7%. Last month, following the rout in bonds, munis dropped by about 7%.

The dollar value on the sell off equates to about $5b. The pre-funded munis, which are munis paid off with treasuries, are now yielding 1.53% — the highest since Lehman’s collapse.

I don’t care how awesome Trump is going to be or how great you think the economy is now, the hockey sticking of yields is never a good thing — especially in a government bedridden by $20t in debt.

The last time this happened, markets became disjointed in January of 2009 — paving the way for a record 16% lift in munis, as investors fled stocks in search of safer havens.

The market is allowed to trade lower every once in awhile. There is nothing harsh or unusual about stocks trading down after a big leg up. The rotation out of tech and into basic materials is happening and there’s nothing wrong with that either. Barring a complete melt down, which is highly unlikely to occur in the month of December, the bulls have won the battle for 2016 — holding firm in a year wrought with uncertainty.

My bubble Basket, domisciled in Exodus, has broken down. I update this portfolio every 6 months with what I interpret to be the highest valuation stocks. After a harmonious lift post election, they’re finally heading lower again — off by more than 2% today.

Tech stocks are getting shredded and breadth stands at about 38%. The very worst performers could be found in the semis.

It’s very odd to see such a divergence between the Dow and the Nasdaq, but not entirely unpresecedented. For me, the much bigger picture is the rapid ascent of rates and the dollar. Eventually, they will crush corporate earnings of exporters. But the market only seems to care about momentum, especially after a long year of bitter partisan politics. It is not, however, factoring in the fundamentals. Then again, the market hasn’t truly factored in fundamentals in years.

People only seem interested in the facts when things go wrong.

Let’s put this into perspective. The maker of poisonous breakfast cereals pulled their ads from Breitbart, a very popular news site associated with the Trump campaign, because it didn’t align with their values — set forth in their advertising guidelines.

They said associating with brands like Breitbart wasn’t ‘consistent with their brand or corporate image.’

In a scathing report on child labor violations for procuring palm oil in Indonesia, Amnesty International lays waste to corporate giants like Unilever, Colgate, Proctor and Gamble and you guessed it Kellogg’s.

Amnesty has testimony and video of children as young as 8 years old, pulled from school to work on a slave plantation to endure ‘back breaking labor’,  exposed to harsh chemicals and very heavy materials.

Let’s be clear, placing ads on pro Trump site is not conducive with Kellogg’s corporate image, but buying palm oil from a slave plantation that works 8 year old children is.

The human rights organisation traced a range of well-known products back to the palm oil company Wilmar, which it alleged employs children to do back-breaking physical labour on refineries in Indonesia.

Singapore-based Wilmar counts multinational companies including Kellogg’s, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Reckitt Benckiser and Nestlé among its major clients, according to Amnesty.

In a 110-page report accompanied by a video, Amnesty alleged products sold by those companies were “tainted by appalling human rights abuses … with children as young as eight working in hazardous conditions”.

“There is nothing sustainable about palm oil that is produced using child labour and forced labour. Something is wrong when nine companies turning over a combined revenue of £260bn in 2015 are unable to do anything about the atrocious treatment of palm oil workers earning a pittance.”

She said allegations of child labour at Wilmar were not “isolated incidents but are systemic and a predictable result of the way Wilmar does business”.

In the report, Amnesty alleged that children aged from eight to 14 were carrying out dangerous work without safety equipment, were exposed to toxic pesticides and regularly carried sacks of palm fruit weighing 25kg.

One 10-year-old boy, who claims he started working for a Wilmar supplier aged eight, said he gets up at 6am to gather fruit and works every day but Sunday. “I don’t go to school … I carry the sacks with the loose fruit by myself but can only carry it half full. My hands hurt and my body aches,” he said.

In response to this report, Kellogg’s said “any supply chain violations of our global palm oil principles, we work with the supplier to understand corrective actions and ensure they understand our commitments. If the concerns are not adequately addressed, we take action to remove them from our supply chain.”

The joys of globalism.

#DumpKelloggs

Pardon me, but I physically recoil when I read yellow journalism by shills trying to promote a narrative that is either entirely false or exaggerated for political purposes. During the election, at the vanguard of the Clinton talking points were to ignore all of the scandals coming out of Wikileaks or the DNCleaks because they were the byproduct of Russian hacking — a charge that was never backed up with any real evidence.

CNN even went as far to say that it was ILLEGAL to possess the Wikileaks and that viewers should only watch CNN to see what it was all about. Utter and complete bullshit.

Now we have a consummate professional shill, Chris Strohm, reporting for Bloomberg — suggesting that one of the leading internet security companies in the country believes Russia ‘weaponized social media’ to affect the elections. By doing so, Strohm is attempting to legitimize a talking point that hitherto has proven to be nothing short of conspiratorial guess work.

Let’s examine his evidence.

Claim:
Russia’s government didn’t just hack and leak documents from U.S. political groups during the presidential campaign: It used social media as a weapon to influence perceptions about the election, according to cybersecurity company FireEye Inc.

Material stolen by Russia’s intelligence services was feverishly promoted by online personas and numerous fake accounts through links to leaked material and misleading narratives, according to an analysis of thousands of postings, links and documents by FireEye, which tracks Russian and Chinese hackers breaking into U.S. systems. The operation was a new and belligerent escalation by Moscow in the cyber domain, company Chairman David DeWalt said.

Firstly, FireEye has been making a lot of claims for a very long time. This isn’t anything new. Plus, their stock is a steaming pile of shit, down about 90% over the past few years — the very worst mut in a kennel filled with dogs.

Secondly, there are hackers everywhere, many of which live right here in the US. Just because something is coming from Russia doesn’t mean the fucking government is doing it to crush the democrats. This is lazy thinking and not at all rational.

“The dawning of Russia as a cyber power is at a whole other level than it ever was before,” DeWalt said in an interview in Washington. “We’ve seen what I believe is the most historical event maybe in American democracy history in terms of the Russian campaign.”

What does that even mean? Yes, hacking is at an all time high. Yes, people need to remain vigilant. But when you say ‘Russia as a cyber power’, are you implying that the Russian government is doing it? If so, show us the evidence.

The closeness of the Nov. 8 election sparked scrutiny over the spread of fake news and has fueled demands from Green Party candidate Jill Stein, backed by some Democrats and independents, for a recount in key states lost by Democrat Hillary Clinton. President-elect Donald Trump responded on Twitter that “millions” of people voted illegally, which he said may have been what cost him the popular vote, but he offered no evidence.

Fucking idiot.

‘Minor’ Incidents

A computer scientist for Stein said security flaws in voting machines and suspicions of Russian meddling justified the recount efforts. J. Alex Halderman, a professor at the University of Michigan, said hackers could have infected Pennsylvania’s voting machines with malware designed to lay dormant for weeks, pop up on Election Day and then erase itself without a trace. Trump narrowly won Pennsylvania as well as two other states where Stein’s campaign may seek recounts, Michigan and Wisconsin.

None of what he just said in the paragraph above is true. All parties, including Stein and Clinton have said, repeatedly, that there is no evidence that the elections were tampered with. Nate Silver, hardly a fan of Trump, explains to people drolling about the earth, like Strohm, that it’s the demographics stupid, not the Russians.

We found no apparent correlation5 between voting method and outcome in six of the eight states, and a thin possible link between voting method and results in Wisconsin and Texas. However, the two states showed opposite results: The use of any machine voting in a county was associated with a 5.6-percentage-point reduction in Democratic two-party vote share in Wisconsin but a 2.7-point increase in Texas, both of which were statistically significant.6 Even if we focus only on Wisconsin, the effect disappears when we weight our results by population. More than 75 percent of Wisconsin’s population lives in the 23 most populous counties, which don’t appear to show any evidence for an effect driven by voting systems.7 To have effectively manipulated the statewide vote total, hackers probably would have needed to target some of these larger counties. When we included all counties but weighted the regression by the number of people living in each county, the statistical significance of the opposite effects in Wisconsin and Texas both evaporated.

Even if the borderline significant result for Wisconsin didn’t vanish when weighting by population, it would be doubtful, for a few reasons. You’re more likely to find a significant result when you make multiple tests, as we did by looking at eight states with and without weighting by population.9 Also, different places in Wisconsin and Texas use different kinds of voting machines; presumably if someone really did figure out how to hack certain machines, we’d see different results depending on which type of machines were used in a county, but we don’t. And Nate Cohn of The New York Times found that when he added another control variable to race and education — density of the population — the effect of paper ballots vanished.

Back to Bloomberg’s Russian scare.

Kevin Mandia, chief executive officer, of Milpitas, California-based FireEye, and DeWalt said in the interview this week that they haven’t seen any evidence that U.S. vote tabulation systems were hacked. And U.S. officials have said they saw only “minor” cyber incidents on Election Day.

What the fuck is that all about? If you weren’t paying attention, the headline said ‘social media’ was playing a role in the elections, not hacking. But then the reporter delved right into hacking, making it seem like FireEye was implying there might’ve been a breach. Strohm even mentioned some guy who said some miracle voting virus could’ve been planted ahead of time and activated on election day. Yeah, and I could’ve won the lottery the other day, had I played it.

“We did not see anything that I would characterize as significant,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said at a Bloomberg Government event Nov. 14 in Washington. “There were minor incidents here and there of the type that you would normally expect, but nothing significant.”

End of story, right? Of course not, the lies have to be woven into an intricate web of deceit in order to confuse an otherwise idiot public.

He continues.

Russian officials have repeatedly rejected accusations that the government hacks or supports groups that does so on its behalf.

That hasn’t quelled concerns. The activity detected in the FireEye analysis echoed the Russian strategy of information warfare seen previously in cyber attacks on Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine, where a simmering border conflict has claimed almost 10,000 lives over 2 1/2 years.

As far as I can tell, the so called ‘information warfare’ is nothing more than a few trolls opening up Twitter and Facebook accounts to fuck with people. Hello, wakey the fuck up. This is stupid.

The strategy isn’t limited to online media. The U.K. in October closed the British bank account for RT, a Russian state-controlled news service that was reprimanded by the U.K. media regulator Ofcom for biased or misleading reporting on Syria and Ukraine. Russia protested the move, saying it was being targeted for political reasons.

Baseless.

Democrats’ Request

On Tuesday, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee sent President Barack Obama a letter asking him to declassify information about Russian activity related to the U.S. election.

“We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public,” the senators wrote. “We are conveying specifics through classified channels.”

Then do it and show us the evidence. Anything short of evidence is idle speculation or propaganda.

A month before the election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Homeland Security Department issued a joint statement saying American intelligence agencies were confident that Russia directed hacking against U.S. political groups.

“The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” according to the statement. “The Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Remember Seth Rich. Again, there is zero evidence tying Russian agents to DCleaks or Wikileaks. This is childish already.

False Personas

In line with those findings, FireEye has mapped what it says is a Russian-backed campaign using at least six key false hacktivist personas to advance the country’s interests, including Guccifer 2.0, DC Leaks, Anonymous Poland and Fancy Bears’ Hack Team. The company’s autopsy also includes thousands of postings on Twitter as well as fake social-media accounts used to pass the information back and forth to generate an online buzz.

So, FireEye has concluded that people from Russia have Twitter accounts and shitpost. Anything more? This is groundbreaking.

The hacking extends to trying to use legitimate websites to promote stolen material. Guccifer 2.0, for example, first promoted stolen documents from the Democratic National Committee through The Smoking Gun and Gawker. There’s no evidence that those websites knew that hacked material given to them was part of a broad campaign to meddle in the U.S. election.

The ‘evidence’ tying Guccifer 2.0 to Russia is a proxy IP address. How silly is this?  In an interview with RT, Guccifer laughed the whole thing off.

“I read several reports, some experts found out that my proxy IP is hosted at a service that’s somehow connected with Russia and has a version in Russian as well as in English,” the individual wrote as cited by WSJ. “This is their strong evidence,” he wrote, adding a smile emoticon.

“It made me angry they attributed my deals to the Russians,” the hacker wrote. “But then I realised the deeper they go this way the safer I am.”

“My goal is to bring the truth, I call it to bring the light,” the hacker wrote, adding that “the big capital has occupied the policy” and “big [IT] companies are leading us to the disaster.”

Back to Bloomberg.

The campaign also includes what FireEye terms “direct advocacy,” in which the personas direct tweets promoting stolen or false information at the accounts of influential people such as journalists, and “indirect advocacy”in which social-media accounts seemingly unaffiliated with the personas also engage in promotion.

Which social media accounts have been hacked and which ‘influential journalists’ have been infiltrated by Russian hackers? I do this everyday and cannot recall seeing one in the news. Again, show me, the curious reader, actual evidence.

Even after the U.S. election, there are few signs that Russia’s actions are abating, creating a complicated, emerging challenge for the incoming Trump administration, FireEye’s DeWalt said. During the campaign, Trump was deferential to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, and repeatedly questioned the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was meddling in American elections. For years, Russian spies carried out stealthy hacking attacks aimed at hiding their identities, said Mandia, the FireEye CEO. Their tactics began to change around the fall of 2014 and have now escalated to include leaking stolen documents and apparently caring less about operational security or getting caught, Mandia said.

“That’s a change in the rules of engagement,” Mandia said. “All of a sudden, they’re more of a tank through the cornfield when they hack, not a whisper or a ghost.”

Fucking drama Queens. Russian spies. Hacked Twitter accounts. People retweeting fake news. Tanks through the corn field. When will the madness end?