Saturday Cinema with Le Fly: A Beautiful Mind

Last year, Nobel prize winning mathematician and the man whom this movie was based upon was killed in a taxi coming home from the airport. The moron driving him, most likely some Turk, was new to the business of livery. Previous to killing John Nash and his wife, the livery cab driver was a fucking iced cream truck driver.

(Pause)

This movie was about Nash cracking Russian code for the lug wrenches in the US military, circa 1950s. It was also about Nash’s schizophrenia, something that haunted him for his entire life. It was a supreme cinematic accomplishment for director Ron Howard and lead actor Russel Crowe.

Personally, I rather enjoyed Ed Harris menacing Nash throughout the film, fucking with his big, crazy, brain.

If it were my tombstone, it’d read: ‘Genius. Helped win Cold War. Won Nobel Prize for Game Theory. Professor at MIT, Princeton. Killed by fucking iced cream truck driver. Fuck this shit.’

All of the people on Twitter were circle jerking around their quotrons this morning, as the Dow ran higher by 150 and the NASDAQ by 40 plus some odd points. Lo and behold, all of that has left us now and there is nothing but a whisper remaining of the good times of 10 am.

As reported in Exodus this morning, in real time, I closed out my SPY position at the open for $205.21–for a 1.5% gain. Although small and insignificant in isolation, these gains will add up over time. At the present, I am 50% cash, the rest in XLE short and TLT long.

I make no predictions for the last 40 minutes of trade. I merely point out the instability and incessant marauding taking place by the pirates who operate freely on Wall Street. Perhaps you too will come to the same conclusion that I did, late in 2015, and pursue a much more structured and algorithmic approach to the markets. Gone are the days of artistic selection and hunches and tips and chart breakouts.

What we have left is a boulevard filled with misdirection and purposeful tomfoolery, designed to extract dollars and cents out of your accounts into ‘theirs.’ I realize this sounds nuts, very populistic, and bombastic in nature–but it’s true.

My goals, henceforth, is to demonstrate an ability to create value through a low-beta, sandwich eating lifestyle.

Year to date, I am up 3.7%, while sashaying (no homo), room to room, watching everyone else denigrate themselves–attempting to make market calls.

Touching upon the pristine work done by Moody’s last night, Dick Bove from Raffle Capital, said the banks were in great shape and that their exposure to oil, aside from a few haggard regional banks, was laughable.

As a point in fact, it is rumored that Dick almost choked on a pork chop last night, while laughing at how small these losses were for the banks, as a pork chop bone descended into his throat.

By laugh, I mean Bove looked stoned face into the camera, like a miserable Santa Claus, and slightly curved his lips, obviously bemused by the whole ordeal.

Michael J. Cavanagh made $40.6 million in his first year at Comcast, making him the highest paid CFO in the country. The CEO of Comcast, Brian Roberts, made a mere $36.2 million, hardly enough to buy a halfway decent sized apartment in NYC.

It was Cavanagh’s first year at the slimeball cable giant, after coming from JP Morgan–where he toiled away with Jamie Dimon for over two decades.

Cavanagh’s compensation included a $1.8 million salary, $16.5 million in stock awards, $4 million in option awards, a $6 million cash bonus and $11.8 million in deferred compensation, Comcast reported in the summary compensation table in a Friday proxy statement.

Why do these fine gentlemen get paid such generous portions of U.S. dollars?

They create shareholder value, of course.

Over the past year, Comcast’s share price has appreciated by 5.7%

The U.S. rig count has now fallen in 15 of the past 16 weeks. As U.S. oil production gets cut to ribbons, middle eastern and OPEC oil production remain robust. While U.S. rig counts have dropped by a staggering 57% from last year, Middle Eastern rig counts remain at record highs. How is this possible?

The House of Saud has a lower cost of production and the state is actively supporting its sole industry, while America is more than comfortable to see its crown jewels wither away–without trying to protect this vital industry.

That being said, crude is higher by 5.5% and oil stocks are surging.

Nothing unfair about this. If you’re a driller in N. Dakota, simply move your family to the middled east and slap a hajib onto your wife and daugter’s and find good work over there.

Given the pin action in retarded retailer, The Gap, I’d say the sloths over at BAC are on to something here.

“Given difficult annual comparisons, this leaves sales down 0.1 percent year-over-year,” writes Deputy Head of U.S. Economics Michelle Meyer.
Lower-income households, which spend a disproportionately higher amount of their take-home pay on fuel, have been registering better annual retail sales growth excluding autos and gas than richer households as oil prices started falling in 2014.

Disconcertingly, this gasoline dividend might have been fully paid.

“In the past few months, spending for the low-end consumer has slowed, falling back below the growth rate of the high-end cohort,” notes Meyer.

Does it even matter anymore? I mean, really, these stocks dive lower upon horrid earnings–only to come springboarding back again when the season is over. We’ve been living in a Peter Pan’d world for over half a decade now. The consumer has been dead for years. But, now, the sages at BAC are onto something, eh?

Fuck off.

One of the robe wearing psychotics at the Vatican called Sanders’ move to invite himself to a catholic conference, 4 days ahead of the NY primaries, “monumental discourtesy.”

Politicians are an incorrigible lot and this small event in time and space make me smile, ear to ear. Imagine the frown B. Sanders has on his face right now, after reading the response from the Vatican. This is a man who couldn’t care less about religion, who is assuredly an atheist, getting rebuked by leaders of a religion that he doesn’t even belong to. The only reason why he’s attempting to go in the first place is because of some asshole staffer, who cited some poll data, and thought it’d make a neat press clipping to curry the favor of idiot catholic fence sitting voters.

“Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons,” Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is hosting the conference Sanders will attend, said in a telephone interview. “I think in a sense he may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly — not that he will.”

Clearly, the Pope isn’t feeling The Bern.

Morons.

Never shy to declare wanton doom, Nouriel Roubini suggested that if England left the EU, the Scotts would leave England, the Catalonians would leave Spain and Norway and Greece would leave the EU too. I am sure if given the chance to discuss this further, Nouriel would’ve predicted Texas secession and a fucking break-off of the state of California, which would then drift and ram itself (homo) into N. Korea–at which point the former American state would become a prison torture camp for all inhabitants.

What the hell is going on here? According to Charlie’s Twitter account, Valeant was rumored to be putting its Bausch Lomb division for sale.

Maybe these bankers were simply playing a hypothetical game at one of Charlie’s favorite watering holes? At ant rate, the man, the myth, the Legend of Montauk, Bill Ackman, shot down these rumors, saying “It’s a core asset. “We’re only considering selling non-core assets.”

Since Pershing basically runs Valeant now, I’ll take him at his word.

Bankers are likely combing over all of Valeant’s assets, looking for parts to sell. Naturally, the Bausch division would be of supreme interest to any banker, as it would be easy to sell and fetch a high premium.

Shares of VRX are slightly lower today, off by 3%.

Oil stocks are crushing to the upside this morning, off an astounding 5.5% move in WTI. Some will tell you that the 4/17 OPEC meeting, which might impose a production freeze, is the catalyst. Truth is, there are no real reasons for these moves. It’s simply a matter of liquidity, sloshing in and out of assets.

Traders are making bets, just like with horses or Pete Rose baseball games, that XYZ will be able to restructure its debt and survive at $39 WTI.

This is silly poppycock. Hardly any small, marginal, players will thrive at $39 WTI. Then again, maybe WTI will trade back to $60 soon?

Right or wrong, that’s the bet now.

People remember the gains enjoyed the last time crude bottomed in the $30s–back in 2009. They want to repeat that glory.

You can’t blame people for dreaming.