$CVT Acquired for Monster Premium

Vista equity partners are buying up piece of shit software company, Cvent, for a 69% premium.

“This milestone is the next chapter in our 17-year history,” Reggie Aggarwal, founder and chief executive officer of Cvent, said in the statement. “With Vista’s financial strength to invest in Cvent now and in the future, we will be better positioned to deliver innovative solutions that transform the meetings and events industry, and to offer employees new opportunities for career growth.”

Great job CVT management for ripping off those private equity asshats. Well played!

The fuck out of here with these numbers. If you’re one of the morons buying MS in the pre-market due to their ‘earnings beat’, I hope that you soon find yourself tied to a gibbet, set to receive 1,000 lashes about the back and neck.

“The Fly” does not mess around when it comes to doling out punishment to those who heartily deserve it.

Year over year, the clowns at MS saw revenues stagger and then plunge, down 21% to $7.79 bill. Net income clown car crashed into a brick wall, off by 53% to $1.13 billion, or 55 cents per share.

The answer to these horrible times? Fire a bunch of fixed income guys of course. Morgan, like so many other investment banks, just want to get rid of those pesky traders, so that they can focus on wealth advisory. You know, offer some asshole 300% of his trailing 12, so that he can bring his asshole team over and manage his clients assets through ETF allocations, by which he’ll charge them 1% per annum for saying hi to them every 6 months.

“The first quarter was characterized by challenging market conditions and muted client activity,” Gorman said in the statement. “While we see some signs of market recovery, global uncertainties continue to weigh on investor activity.”

Wait until the market really drops and these banks are trying to dig themselves out of the quicksand filled with a bunch of incompetent advisors who are losing client assets hand over fist.

America, you are not permitted to protect your businesses or shift the balance of trade in your favor. The World Trade Organization deems it to be illegal. Moreover, according to China’s Finance Minister, you do not deserve to be a world power should you follow Trump’s irrational policies.

Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei criticized Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, calling him “an irrational type” due to his proposal that tariffs on imported Chinese goods be increased to up to 45 percent.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Sunday, Lou said, “Trump is an irrational type. If he were to do this, that would be in violation of the rules set by the World Trade Organization.”

Lou said that if the United States put Trump’s proposal into effect, it “would not be entitled to its position as the world’s major power. The U.S. needs to recognize that the U.S. and China are mutually dependent on each other. Our economic cycles are intertwined.”

Intertwined. Is this what he calls ‘intertwined?’

The Japanese yield curve continues to flatten. Long duration yields are now at record lows. Their currency is up 10% since rates were taken into negative territory. And, finally, yields up to 13 year duration are now negative.

The Bank of Japan made a woeful mistake, thinking negative yields would spur inflation. The exact opposite has occurred. They thrusted negative rates onto an aging, saver, populous. The response has been records sales for home vaults and safes. People are embracing the deflationary vortex and the Japanese government do not know what to do.

The flight to safety intensified as crude tumbled after oil-producing nations failed to reach an accord to freeze supplies. The yen rose towards a 17-month high against the dollar after members of the Group of 20 nations signaled opposition last week to any efforts from Japan to directly halt the yen’s 11 percent climb this year.

“The yen’s appreciation in the wake of the G-20 meeting is putting the BOJ in a position where it has to do something,” said Genji Tsukatani, Tokyo-based fund manager at JPMorgan Asset Management Inc. “The JGB yield curve is flattening on views inflationary pressure is waning further, strengthening demand for super-long bonds. Investors are losing places to park money so they have to buy even as yields fall.”

Interesting times.

The price of brent is off by 4% tonight, up from the lows of -6%. In case you’re wondering what to expect for tomorrow’s trade in the oil patch, I took the liberties to scour the prices of energy shares traded in Asia.

This is what I’ve found.

Australia

Beach Energy -6.5%

Santos -6.1%

Origin Energy -5.1%

Hong Kong

CNOOC -4.5%

Petrochina -2.4%

China Petro -2.4%

Japan

Inpex -5%

JX Holdings -2.2%

DAX futs are off by 0.5%.

Based off these numbers, I’m guessing XLE open up at $61.5, down by 3%.

The Sunday Times is reporting the executives from Astrazeneca are holding ‘secret’ talks to acquire MDVN, who just rebuffed an ‘inadequate’ bid from Sanofi. I never quite understood how these rumors get leaked. Perhaps one of the idiot secretaries, or receptionist, at AZN sold the info for 10 bucks to the Sunday Times, effectively costing her company millions in potential expenditures for making an elevated bid for MDVN?

Either way, this so called bid has not been proposed to the lads at Medivation just yet.

In March, MDVN hired JP Morgan to explore ‘strategic alternatives.’

The dollar is losing pace v the yen, off by 0.5%. But that’s more of a side effect of risk off than crude related.The Australian dollar and

The Australian dollar is off by  1.05% v the dollar.

The Canadian dollar is getting poleaxed v the dollar, off by 1.3%.

Finally, the dollar is up 2.1% v the Russian ruble.

It’s worth noting, the dollar is unch v the Saudi Riyal.

This is hardly what I’d describe as ‘tumultuous’. If the desired outcome of the chatter leading up to Doha was to put a bid under the price of crude, consider this excursion into idiocy a great big satanic success. All of the House of Saud members are celebrating tonight’s mild 5% drop in crude at their harems, as they sashay from one room of decadence to the next.

Over here in the states, S&P futures are off 9ish, all very boring indeed. In order to get me excited, I’d need to see crude down 10% and SPY futs off by 3% to get me out of my seat. There is nothing desirable about the current state of crude. But the bulls seem to be intent on holding it up for a little while longer.

God willing, as the night matures, true sellers of an ominous nature take control of this cartoonish response and enact punitive measures against all of the green-shooters littering the markets with pestilent buy orders.

This week inside Exodus, the algorithms went apeshit for crude, suggesting in the strongest of terms that crude oil was overbought and a sundry of crude based ETFs were overdue for a sharp rebuke.

Having made a commitment to follow the algorithms to the strictest of terms in 2016, by the end of the week I found myself 125% exposed to the market, of which 100% of my assets placed in a short position against XLE.

Naturally, the algos had no idea that oil talks were to be held in Doha. It only detected a very perverse bullishness in crude oil, supported by scores of overzealous traders. Should the talks in Doha fail, there is a strong chance that the recent rally in oil will be unwound and the trades suggested by Exodus proved inexorably correct.

The above were my blogs inside Exodus for the week which has passed. Below are the unprecedented oversold signals in the inverse ETF DUG.

My preference, of course, is to be short XLE, as it poses far less risk through a marked deceased volatility thanks to the mega cap status of its members.

It’s worth noting, this is the boldest position of mine for 2016. Having 100% of my assets short XLE and another 25% long TLT, it’s fair to assume the tone and measure of my performance, for the first half of 2016, is going to be defined and sorted out over the next two weeks.

We all knew this would be the outcome to these preposterous meetings, did we not? It was concocted by an immature 30 year old Saudi Prince, after all. This is a young man, who grew up with palatial privilege, totally unfamiliar with how to deal with hard men who’d rather blow themselves up in Doha than to cede power to a monarchy of self-righteous, greedy, boys.

As such, the talks have ended without an agreement.

The summit in the Qatari capital, which dragged on for more than ten hours beyond its initially scheduled conclusion, finished with no final accord, Nigeria’s Petroleum Minister Emmanuel Kachikwu told reporters. Discussions stumbled over whether the agreement should extend to other producers such as Iran, which wasn’t present, according to a person familiar with the matter. The inability to reach consensus will lead to a “severe” drop in prices, Citigroup Inc. predicted before the meeting.

Brent crude, which sank to a 12-year low in January, has climbed almost 30 percent in the past two months as Saudi Arabia and Russia worked on the plan to cap crude production. While analysts doubted that any accord would have a significant impact on the global oil surplus, the inability to agree on a limit undermines any prospect of coordinated action to solve the oil crisis.

“The Doha meeting was an opportunity for OPEC to polish its tarnished image,” Miswin Mahesh, an analyst at Barclays Plc in London, said on April 15. “After the failure of OPEC’s December meeting, the market was uneasy about its cohesion and Doha was a chance for the group to reassert its relevance and build a circle of trust.”

Unlike many others out there, I don’t think the price of crude will drop much when futures open for trade. These talks never stood a chance to begin with and it’s not like freezing production at all time highs was ever going to have a meaningful impact on the oversupply situation that plagues oil prices.

If oil should drop, however, I’ll be pleased–as I am leveraged short XLE.