Tread Lightly

I had a long night, slept about an hour and now need to return the fucking rental car and then spend the next 8 hrs in the god damned airport waiting for my fucking plane. I also left my favorite sunglasses at the god damned restaurant last night, which means I’ll have to drive right into the damned sun squinting with the flap down on 1 hr sleep absolutely hating my life in thick traffic.

But I won’t complain — as it is not befitting of a gentleman such as myself.

Markets are meandering about and I have very small positions on, lightly hedged. If I attempted to trade heavily now, given my current mental state, I’d probably wipe myself out clean by noon.

Today is a day that I let the emotions and the angst bottle up inside, grin and pretend all is well. I’d like to destroy this fucking market and dump it in Staten Island with the rest of the trash — but I cannot control the lot of you who constantly buy dips and pretend any of this bullshit makes a bit of sense.

Having said that, I’m gonna buy some more $SQQQ now.

I live here now, always have lived in the Newark airport, meandering about in search of deep fried delicacies and cheap beer.

I made 13bps today and presently operate on 1 hr of sleep. It’d be nice to be home or even on a plane — but instead I sit on a hard wooden chair and I wait. After I waited long enough, I shift to the right and wait again and continue to do this until the meaning of life loses its purpose. I’m to stay here indefinitely and just deal with the 55 degree environ in short sleeves, wondering about the warm sun outside and what it might be like to sleep in a bed.

I expect a sharply rally soon, based upon the laws of Stocklabs. I’ll be closing out my shorts in the AM.

At around 3:15pm I saw myself sliding back into olde habits, taking stops on longs and bulking up on $TZA and $LABD. At one point, after had declared to be a tranny-bull, I was 28% short. I quickly disposed of those rascals for profit and bulked the fuck up on America — because we’ve got enemies to kill and/or maim and I am here to profit from it.

This might sound profoundly distasteful to many of you, some random guy on the internet declaring profiteering off war, a wanton disregard for life and peace. That’s right — who can fucking stop me?

Look at me sideways and I’ll have my friends at NATO shove an ATACMs right into your fucking driveway.

Life as an imperialist American is better than ever. We’ve got the poors on the ropes, knifing each other into faces — at the same time grabbing European clay for both sport and profit — without spending any American lives. Think about the grandness of it. Please do not get mad at me for being honest. Many of my compatriots feign concern and hide their motives. I am just here to collect money, toss it away and never look at it again. Knowing the money is there is a great comfort to me and whenever I am given the chance to extract more — I do so.

I closed 104% leveraged long in a pastiche of quality stocks. I am a reformed bull, whose allegiance to peace and justice has since been incinerated before my new pagan idols in exchange for whatever I am now — which varies on a day by day basis.

I was on a call when markets doubled early gains and I got caught, fooled even, with shorts in tow. As a result of this, I am down 69bps. Knowing what to do, I covered my shorts and added to more longs in an effort to invest alongside the prevailing intra-day trend. I am, however, short oil stocks — because of weakness apparent.

I wanted markets lower — but it seems there is a chasm between what I want to happen and what is actually happening. My intent here is to halve my losses, hopefully harvest gains, and then reload some shorts into the close for the big Monday belly-flop onto the hard pavement covered with rocks and glass.

I’d place the odds of a downside reversal for today at exactly zero. Although breadth is a middling 56% — there is very good action in tech and mega cap stocks. I will need to dig into the market some more to get a more educated or sophisticated view on things.

But for now, this looks constructive.

I depart for Boston tomorrow and will have limited access to the internets until Wednesday, so I wanted to get some thoughts about markets before bed.

* Markets lifted for the month but it was chaotic and narrow
* Most sectors were NET LOWER because of the narrow concentration
* Defensive sectors were impressive

Some notable winners:

$META +10%, $BRK +10%, $LLY +19%, $JPM +5.7%, $WMT +12%, $NFLX +11%, $ISRG +11%, $RACE +20%, $MELI +23%, $SHOP +21%

Focusing in on the winners of +10% or more.

* There were 305 stocks +10% or more
* Median EBITDA was +15.8%. If we only screened for positive EBITDA, the average was +25%
* Median gross margins were +52%
* Average FCF TTM was $802M
* Median rev growth was 9%
* Average market cap was $24b
* Median price of stock was $44

Are you getting it yet? There are methods of trading and there are methods of investing. When investing the above matters, because the fundamentals always, eventually, drive share prices. When trading, price and volume drive the momentum and to be a trader means to be changeable and unfaithful to dogma.