My Review of The Habit Burger Grill

A new Habit Grill opened in New Jersey two weeks ago, so I decided to mosey on down to give it a try. The restaurant is very inviting, clean, and conducive to serving dozens of people comfortably. I ordered just about everything on the menu, having the advantage of being accompanied by my family.

First, let me just say, their grilled tuna sandwich is outrageous and is the best thing on the menu. This will appeal to people, like women, who opt out of eating red meat. Their bacon chicken club with avocado was good too, along with the fries and shake.

The hamburger, specifically their double char burger was excellent, in a Burger King sort of way. If The Habit Grill is the new Burger King, then Shake Shack is the new Mcdonald’s, taste wise. It’d be funny if both mega-burger chains were behind this great burger conspiracy, no?

All in all, Shake Shack is a better restaurant. For my palate, In and Out and Bobby’s Burger Palace both have better burgers than The Habit Grill too. However, there is plenty of room for growth here. And even though HABT doesn’t have the best burger, that doesn’t mean their business won’t prosper the most. The best product in any category rarely wins. It’s all about execution and management. We’ve yet to see how good the managers are at HABT; but will get a glimpse this Tuesday, after they report earnings.

NOTE: I know some of you are obsessed with the news out of Greece. It is a non-event.

Citizen Kane is the best movie ever made. I realize it’s the favorite of critiques and the lot of you like to fade ‘experts’. But in this instance, they are absolutely right.

There once was a time when I hated old movies. I felt they were a waste of time, stupid dead people on black and white screens. But then I calmed down and started to pay attention to what was being said on the screen, instead of what was happening. Orson Welles, who would’ve been the best director to ever live had it not been for being blacklisted for making Citizen Kane, preferred to make black and white movies over color. Well into the color teevee days, he still made black and white films because he felt it added a certain glamor to the movie, making viewers focus on the content and not the pageantry (extra Ashley Schaeffer).

Citizen Kane represents a lot of things to me.

When I was young and successful, growing up in the business, truth be told, I was ashamed at how young I looked. I always looked 5 years younger than I actually was and meeting clients was always a point of stress for me, since I looked like a kid out of high school. Now that I am older I realize that youth was never anything to be ashamed of, but to embrace.

Orson Welles was the youngest director at the time. At 25, he made the greatest movie of all-time. This success was never to be repeated and marked the apex of his long career. What a terrible thing to live with, topping out and never being able to repeat the glory you once had.

Welles, famous at the time for one of the best pranks of all-time (Interestingly enough, many years later, a lad in Ecuador tried to repeat this prank, which resulted in his audience to go bat-shit crazy. Riots ensued and they burnt the fucking radio station down to a cinder, killing 7 in the process.), the War of the World’s radio broadcast, which tricked all of the idiots listening into believing a martian invasion was at hand, was a firebrand and because of this was given a blank check to make Kane. Commercially, it was not a success and behind the scenes it was a fucking nightmare for movies execs, since the movie is actually about the life of the most powerful media man of the time: William Randolph Hearst.

At any rate, if you’ve never seen Citizen Kane–do it today. It is a timeless classic.

NOTE: As a result of Citizen Kane, I researched and viewed all of Welles’ work, even the stuff never published. For the next few weeks, I will be reviewing his films, opting for thematic reviews over random.

The market is going to fry the eyes out from your sockets on Monday. For the day, I was barely down, buttressed by gains in HABT, FL, ICPT and SBNY.

We’ll get it all back, and more, on Monday.

NOTE: Be sure to check in tomorrow for “Saturday Cinema with Le Fly”, where I intend to reveal my favorite movie of all time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZkSmshyalI

After 12,000 Dow points to the scrotum, bears are out on social media, hardcore like the gimp, declaring today is the top. Their brokerage accounts are negative $12 billion; but that won’t stop their troll-flow, fully intent on plaguing bulls with their ominous warnings (extra Hindenburg omen).

Why, precisely, are you selling stocks today? Too many jobs? The economy is too hot, euro-QE is too effective?

REITs and anything high yield are getting blown out the water. The way this market is acting, the Fed will likely do an emergency rate hike by Monday, you know, to stem the tide of runaway inflation (extra sarcasm).

Listen to me, son: this draw-back is temporary. It’s built upon flawed logic, concocted by men with deformed faces in superman shirts.

The drama queens are out in full force today, in light of this morning’s robust jobs report. All of a sudden, rates are on the cusp of skyrocketing, which will, in turn, plunge the US economy into the deepest depression since 2008. The same people who just got new jobs, ironically, will lose them in fairly short order, after the Fed jacks up rates and completely demolishes the US economy.

After that, ISIS will sail across the Mediterranean sea, with make-shift boats made from severed heads, and burn down the city of Rome. Then, they will make their way down to Vatican City, where they will behead the Pope and fly their black flag atop St. Peter’s Basilica.

Shortly thereafter, Janet Yellen will have an epiphany, during a podiatrist appointment, and intervene in the markets by starting another round of QE, which will, in turn, reverse the depression, kill ISIS, and rebuild the city of Rome to its former glory.

FML

First of all, we need some bad news in order to get this market going again. Far too many chaps are getting jobs and becoming less dependent upon the government’s tit. The way this market is designed is to keep the working class out of work, while the rich aggrandize themselves through slave wages sought out in China. That’s number one.

Number two, if TLT is going to crush the faces of all the morons who own it, that’s a good thing. Natural order will restore the balance, the chi, and select the milk sop finaglers to loiter about the cemetery, six feet deep.

Number three, if rates are going to rise and there is nothing we can do to stop it, we might as well profit from it. How does one do that? Very simply, indeud.

BUY THE FUCKING BANKS.

As rates rise, the yield curve will inevitably widen and so will the profit margins at your favorite banks. The number one bank stock in this environment  is BAC. My favorite super-regional is SBNY, and I am also long MS and LAZ.

The move in TLT is so powerful it will likely knock the hockey-pucks out of those who are long it, leading to a sustained rally in banks. Grab this bull by the horns and enjoy the rotation.

and idle.

We would’t want you partaking in this free money handout. After all, quantitative easing, the european version, starts tomorrow. We all know how onerous QE is for the markets (rolls eyes).

Today was a big momentum day, with names like BLUE, VSLR, DATA, PEIX, SOL, and WBAI leading the way. Lots of biotech and chinese burrito winners were found. The latter has been plagued by inconsistent performance over the past year. I do not view the move in chinese stocks as something to latch onto. As a matter of fact, you should sell them, always.

I was up just 0.18% for the day, in line with broader indices. I am very diversified and nothing in my portfolio is overweight more than 9% of holdings. With these early gains and overall market strength, I am afforded an opportunity to make a bold move.

After doing a full audit of last year’s disaster, I discovered my trading resulted in 7 down months out of 12. The previous year I was up 11 of 12 months, for a gain of 80%. One of the hallmarks of being a good investor is consistency, which is my main focus here in 2015.

In a world of craven beasts and nymphs, the internet isn’t forgiving of one down year. Your opinions have never meant anything at all to me. As a point in fact, if I were to even discuss this website, or its contents, with Mrs. Fly during dinner this evening, she’d excuse herself from the table and lecture me about “being a child” and “how stupid the website is”. You see, I am your only ally here. Without me, iBankCoin sinks into oblivion and your lives fall into a pathetic mess, one without insight, reason, democracy.

Bonds and stocks will continue to trade inverse to one another until we hit the right numbers. Either stocks hit levels that causes it to plateau or bond yields rise to a reasonable level. The dollar continues to make gains versus the euro, which is an incredibly crowded trade. I don’t play forex; but I hate long dollars here.

Look, TLT has been a great place to hide for the past year. The market has moved away from bidding up speculative money losers, in exchange for larger cap free cash flow generating machines. Because of this change in market dynamics, investors were hurt over the past 12 months.

Over the past week or so, chinese burritos and spec biotech have been running with their socks off. While it’s nice to enjoy these gains and see speculation spreading throughout the marketplace like a good form of cancer, it’s important that you remember that there isn’t a such thing as good form of cancer.

Sell the rips in these names and stay focused on the real companies, who might be selling off a bit here.

Here in the northeast corridor of the United States, snow is part of our birthright. We don’t prance about the beach in the middle of winter with flip-flops, Hawaiian shorts, eating corn dogs. The snow makes us stronger, hardens us from the world around us. Over there in Florida and California, the people are weak, addled by drugs, pornography and lust. They are catamites.

If you’re lucky enough to have been born into one of the 13 original colonies in the northeast, stop complaining about the god damned weather. It happens every year, the snow that is. Another word out of you and I will see to it that you live out the rest of your days next to an active volcano in Hawaii, cavorting with savage tribes and sustaining on nothing more than spam and pineapple juice.

As for stocks, I’ll get to that a little later, if you don’t mind. I have my coffee and eggs in a basket (my favorite breakfast) next to me and would like to eat in peace. Thank you.

So I’m looking over the biotech sector in Exodus this evening and it dawned on me that the higher I went in market cap (I’ve set a ceiling of $5 billion cap in Exodus for biotech. Anything higher is placed in Drugs-Major), the better the returns. Clearly, hedge funds are playing this sector, crowding it to no end. The cynic in me says to run for the hills. Then again, taking into account all the stocks in the industry, it’s “only” up 13% for the year–with many being up more than 50% over the past two months.

But this post isn’t about warnings or throwing wet towels on cool rallies. Instead, I’ve decided to provide you with the tickers of the laggards, names that haven’t performed in line with the industry.

SGEN
JUNO
ACAD
TECH
RCPT
AGIO
PCRX
BLUE
KITE
MDCO
EXAS
FGEN
CMRX
ACOR
KERX
XLRN

I’ve found that when searching for stocks with market caps under $1.3 billion, it’s more hit and miss. The returns start to really weaken under $500 million. On the large cap side, there are only a handful of down stocks, which are ABBV, GRFS, JNJ, ALXN and AZN. Other laggards include AMGN, REGN, VRTX, MRK and LLY.

Botton line: be very careful about overweighting now, especially since the run up has been frantic. But if you are going to do it anyway, follow the smart money, like I did in the past with Randall J. “Fucking” Kirk and XON. Today’s purchase of BCRX was based off the ownership of two highly respected biotech managers: RA Capital and Baker Brothers. I don’t have an edge in BCRX, aside from my arsenal of weaponized influenza.

The above names are food for thought, meant to appeal to bottom fishers, tank suckers, and the cockroaches of the sea.