Who Will Buy Twitter?

I posed this question in a recent Twitter poll. Feel free to vote.

Who will buy $TWTR?

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) September 23, 2016

Rumors are running rampant, courtesy of David Faber, regarding an imminent deal to purchase the piece of shit social media company. While Twitter is widely revered by those in the media as a place to distribute news and oppress those who fail to adhere to a specific social code, most shareholders fucking hate the company and would love nothing more than to see it sold.

The shares are higher by 18% on the news, still well below its IPO price of $26 from three years ago.

If we had a government that sought to protect against a monopoly forming in media, there’s no way they’d permit Google to buy them. Why in the world would CRM want to buy Twitter? That makes no fucking sense at all. They’re in the CRM business, not media. Should they purchase TWTR, expect the share price of CRM to get clown raped.

This leaves us with just one entity left to buy Twitter: The House of Saud, led by the affable and delightfully hedonistic, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — who already owns 5% of the company. If Saudi Arabia bought Twitter, they could gain access to a treasure trove of infidels for rapid extermination. Think of all the synergies an evil empire like that could implement if given the keys to buy Twitter. Since our government is beholden to the Kingdom, I am certain it would get regulatory approval straight away. My only question is, should Saudi Arabia buy Twitter, will they permit women and gays to tweet anymore?

Then there’s always this to consider.

One of the interesting narratives about the Obama-Iranian alliance is that is has applied pressure to our friends, the Saudis. You know, the people who ‘demolitioned’ the World Trade Towers.

The House of Saud has offered to freeze production at an absurd 10.7m barrels per day, way above any historical level over the past decade.

Iran, fresh off of getting out of sanctions, was like ‘go fuck yourself,’ when asked to adhere to some sort of oil freeze. They’re just getting back in. Also, and bear in mind, Iran is capable of producing triple the current amount, which is only 3.6m bpd.

In other words, a deal that was never going to get done didn’t get done, so now oil is collapsing. Makes sense?

Look at this shit, utterly retarded.

WTI is cascading lower, off by 3.4%.

As many of you know, “The Fly” is calling for the end of western finance sometime this century. For most of you who aren’t immortal, you might miss this momentous event. I, on the other hand, intend to preside over this event, fully robed and flowing, leather sandals adorned like Moses, which is forthcoming in the most earnest of ways. Moreover, I fully intend to profit from it — feeding off the blood and the accounts of those foolish enough to believe they could live so carelessly and ignore the perils of rigged markets indefinitely.

But today’s weakness is a mere pittance, a distraction from the true dangers that lurk around the bend.

Markets have broken out of their recent ranges and will most likely trend higher for the next week or so. Having algorithmic intelligence at my finger tips, in Exodus, I can tell you that shorting into hot markets is a low probability bet.

Listen to me. This isn’t the moment of truth or the time to go all in bearish. This is a farce, a ruse, to lure you into an indelible circumstance from which you will depart all the lesser. Bide your time and take a few moments to enjoy the North Eastern foliage and take heart in the fact that a great storm of epic proportions is coming and that when it comes you’ll be prepared. But for now, avoid any temptations to venture out into haphazard bear traps.

Stay aboard the ark, or in the mine, for they are impenetrable vessels, impervious to inclement conditions and deleterious winds that pose grave risks to your well being.

The ceasefire agreement was in place and the possibility of normalcy was within reach. But, according to Russian officials, the deal fell through because the U.S. wanted to keep it secret.

Then American planes bombed and killed dozens of Syrian soldiers, for the benefit of ISIS, later admitting to making a mistake. The next day Russia bombed a UN convoy that was allegedly accompanied by armed rebels. So he we are now, worse off than before.

Thank you Secretary Kerry. Top notch diplomacy efforts.

Ammar al Selmo, the head of civil defense rescue service in opposition-held Aleppo, said three of its four centers in Aleppo had been hit. “What’s happening now is annihilation in every sense of the word,” he told Reuters. “Today the bombardment is more violent, with a larger number of planes.”

Assad remains defiant, saying on Thursday he expected the conflict to “drag on” as long as it is part of a global conflict in which the groups fighting him are backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the United States.

The International Syria Support Group, including Moscow, Washington and other major powers, met on the sidelines of the annual United Nations gathering of world leaders in New York.
“We have exchanged ideas with the Russians and we plan to consult tomorrow with respect to those ideas,” Kerry said, expressing concern at the reports of the planned new Syrian offensive. “I am no less determined today than I was yesterday but I am even more frustrated.”

Maybe if we weren’t pursuing regime change policies around the world and supporting ISIS with air cover, Kerry might find his job far less beguiling.

IMPV is way up this morning, following a Bloomberg report which stated there were multiple bidders for the company and that a deal was imminent.

RBC notes Bloomberg is reporting that there could be several bidders for Imperva including CSCO, IBM and Forcepoint, which is backed by RTN and Vista Equity Partners. Each could make some sense to us as Cisco has a strategy to build out a larger security presence, IBM is the most direct competitor with Guardium and Forcepoint has been active in M&A recently with last year’s acquisition of Websense. As a reminder, the average EV/S multiple for strategic software deals is 4.4x while the average EV/S multiple for a company with 70%+ GMs (Imperva is just shy of 80%) by a strategic bidder is 6.5x. Maintain Outperform and $52 price target that reflects 4.5x EV/S on their FY/17 estimates.

If they did catch a bid, I’d expect shares of FEYE and SPLK to move higher in sympathy.

It looks like China is having troubles with spreading the risk for the eventual failure of their fucked up banking system. It’s being reported by Bloomberg that the government is set to approve CDS trading for companies, citing immense demand by market players to mitigate risk. What many people are not aware of is that China already has a CDS like system in place, called CRM. It was created in 2010 and has failed to mitigate risk miserably.

Five years into its existence, the market for credit risk mitigation (CRM) instruments — the Chinese equivalent of credit-default swaps (CDS) — remains a barren wasteland. Taking into account China’s decade-long rapid credit expansion, as well as the surge in non-performing loans and the rise in corporate bond defaults in more recent years, the failure of CRM is particularly baffling.

Indeed, when it was launched in China in late 2010, it looked like a safe bet that CRM would become a popular hedging tool in the country’s multitrillion dollar credit sector, replicating the triumphant rise of CDS in the international market in the late 1990s. Instead, the market has remained stagnant, and recently — in an effort to solve this puzzle — many pundits and CRM architects have combed through institutional, market and analytical hindrances.

The CRM market’s real bottleneck, however, may well lie in its product design.

It’s interesting to see them capitulate and adopt the CDS system, after six years of obstinate failure. Perhaps they’re merely adopting a superior system that will permit institutions to properly hedge against credit defaults. Or, maybe they foresee a whirlwind of defaults coming soon, as evidenced by the record amount of NPLs, and desire to lessen the eventual Federal burden by letting CDS trading being asap.

On the Lou Dobbs show tonight, Nigel Farage said Hillary represents a privileged, establishment, elite that have made things worse.  He then went on to say she was an ‘awful’ candidate and is the worst American presidential candidate he’s ever seen.

In part two of his rant, Farage likens the U.S. elections as a mirror image of what happened with BREXIT, warning Americans that the establishment will begin to try to instill fear and doubt in their minds, in order to sway them against voting for Trump–who clearly has the momentum.

‘Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?”

How crazy is this woman?

The new moves by the BOJ have been widely dismissed as yet another scheme in an effort to create the illusory inflation they so desperately desire. Because of the litany of failed central bank efforts by the BOJ, markets have punished them with a brutal 19% spike in the yen, effectively front running every single thing they’ve tried to do with a mocking disposition.

As usual, the chardonnay drinking analyst across Wall Street and abroad have offered nothing but acrimonious disapproval to Kuroda’s recent gambit.

Deutsche Bank: New policy equates to the end game for the BOJ. Plan will produce an ‘anchor’ for long end nominal yields and borrowing costs will go up. Moreover, he believes Yen will trade 94 v the dollar by year end. Should inflation expectations fall, credit conditions will tighten and growth will be constrained.

Macquarie: Japan’s current account surplus will ‘bedevil’ the BOJ’s flaccid attempts to create inflation. Deflation is entrenched and these new policies are fucking stupid.

Bank of America: They believe the Yen will weaken next year, but first strengthen this autumn. The retarded bank cites confusion as a contributing factor in their asshatted assessment, stating “The newly introduced 10-year yield target and quantitative target cannot coexist in a clean form.”

Credit Suisse: The Swiss banks eviscerates the BOJ plan, saying “We fear the market has trained itself to be very accepting of the BoJ’s more meager offerings and that is why it still tries to beef up the story around the efficacy of BoJ policy in terms of weakening the JPY.”

Crossborder Capital: Placing faith in the BOJ’s ability to shape the yield curve is woefully misguided and is dangerous. “In short, the new BoJ policy will distort the term structure, could strengthen the Yen and will likely underscore the need for even more fiscal support.”

Moreover, they believe central banks are unable to shape the yield curve and and equates it to “squeezing a balloon full of air in one place [it] simply pushes out the balloon somewhere else.”

As many of you know, I’ve been a big advocate of the twitter platform from day 1, having established by handle there in 2009 and used it to grow the overall traffic of iBankcoin with great success.

It’s worth noting, traffic coming into IBC is up 150% year over year from Twitter. Many of our Exodus members found us through Twitter. Purely from an operational perspective, Twitter is the single best news platform in the world. So, having said all that, how in the world are advertisers not chomping at the bit to reserve ads there?

I can only offer my personal experience there as a testimonial to the fact that the company is being managed by a bearded baboon.

RBC Capital downgraded Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) from Sector Perform to Underperform with a price target of $14.00 (from $17.00).

Analyst Mark Mahaney commented, “This change is based on our belief that Twitter’s value proposition to advertisers could be waning, based on our recent advertiser survey data. We note that we still believe Twitter is a unique asset with a strong value proposition to core users.”

The analyst listed the following data points on TWTR from a survey of 1,100 advertising professionals:

26% of respondents plan to “significantly” or “modestly” increase their Twitter ad spend vs. 28% who intend to decrease – this is the weakest result we have seen and the first time we have seen a negative skew towards spending.

30% of our survey respondents do not allocate any budget to the Twitter platform, up from 25% in February. And the % who are committing 1%-10% (an experimental level, perhaps) of their Online market budget with Twitter decreased to 54% from 57% last time. Further, we found response rates to bigger Twitter advertising commitments (11% or greater) to be somewhat low, and decreased slightly to 16% from 17% in February and 18% last year.

Only 24% of respondents believe their ROI has improved on the platform versus 21% who think it declined (a negative move from the 29% vs. 21% split seen earlier this year)

When ranked against its peers, Twitter ranked 5th of 7 in terms of ROI to advertisers, behind Google, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, but ahead of Yahoo and AOL

Mahaney’s broad concerns on TWTR are: 1) It’s not clear when/if product/UI changes can stabilize or reaccelerate User & Usage. 2) Channel checks and our last 4 surveys (and particularly our most recent referenced above) don’t provide convincing evidence that a substantial number of advertisers will commit meaningful $s to TWTR.

Without question, RBC is right. If it weren’t for the specter of an imminent buyout by a number of media conglomerates, Twitter’s share price would be appreciable lower.