Microsoft to Acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion, All Cash

Finally, one of these giant companies is putting their money to work, in favor of moronic share buybacks. I love this deal.

Congrats to both MSFT and LNKD longs.

Microsoft has agreed to acquire LNKD for $196 per share, or $26.2bill, in an all cash transaction. The CEO of LNKD will remain onboard running the company.

The stock is higher by almost 50% on the deal.

On March the 10th, 2015, Bain Capital acquired Bluecoat, ticker BCSI, for $2.4 billion. Today, they sold the same piece of shit company to the bagholders at SYMC for $4.65 billion.

According to the WSJ, Bain had “bolstered” Bluecoat with a few cloud acquisitions. Nevertheless, the mark up is sweet, given the time period by which Bain has been saddled with Bluecoat has been less than a year.

Management at Symantec, obviously feeling guilty for paying so much, defended the price tag.

Buying Blue Coat last year “would have been impossible,” operationally, as the company was in the process of divesting itself of Veritas, said Thomas Seifert, Symantec’s chief financial officer.

“If you look at what we’ve paid, it’s well within the range of what an IPO valuation would have been,” he said in a separate interview. “With this IPO path in mind, we think we paid fair value for what we’re receiving.”

This, of course, is total nonsense, as the cyber security space sucks and has traded down, hard, for the better part of the past two years. Look at FEYE for proof.

In the time that Bain acquired Bluecoat until now, industry leader, Palo Alto Networks’, share price has dropped by 25%, while Fireye traded down an astounding 69%.

Tip of the hat to the salesmen at Bain for getting this deal done.

DA Davidson believes that whoever bought a frac sand stock on Friday is a moron of the first magnitude. The sector is up by 100% since December and the fundamentals haven’t improved all that much since then.

They’ve taken liberties to downgrade EMES, FMSA, SLCA and HCLP this morning.

Truth be told, the gains enjoyed in the frackers are a gift, a wild eyed generosity bestowed upon an indigent people by lunatics.

DA Davidson believes their frac sand coverage universe is trading well ahead of fundamentals for a growing industry that is still in flux. The group has moved nearly 100% since their Dec. 4, 2015 initiations and current valuations and/or estimates are devoid of reality; firm would recommend selling the group in favor of a less frothy entry. Further, they believe the group is grossly misunderstood and suffering from a recency bias that disguises a number of sell-side inconsistencies about the space: 1) assuming anything is “Normalized” in an industry that is this new and never been in a steady state; 2) assuming peak margins don’t equate to painfully compressed multiples; 3) underestimating how attractive adding new capacity is, even at mid-single digit FOB margins (17%-25% returns on investment); and 4) assuming a “Secular” sand demand theme will be met with a rising cost curve.

It’s time to get off the beach and into the shade.

Morgan Stanley is out supporting the purchase of treasuries, aka “the ark”, amidst widespread fuckery taking place inside of every major central bank in the world. The arch-devils at Goldman are taking an opposing view, most likely because they’re trying to trick people into trades and then bet against them to meet their quarterly scam goals.

The Morgan call isn’t exactly revolutionary, all things considered. Bonds are, by far, outperforming stocks by 10% this year. They’re merely taking the side of continued momentum, unlike some people (cough) who called for a bond rally before the year started.

“The year started with a bullish tone, and we think that tone is reasserting itself now,” Morgan Stanley analysts including Matthew Hornbach, the head of global interest-rate strategy in New York, wrote in a June 10 report. The Fed will probably make the case for a gradual, cautious approach to raising interest rates, and the BOJ will likely ease monetary policy, according to the report.

Goldman Sachs strategist Francesco Garzarelli warned his clients that U.S. Treasury yields may climb “sharply” in the second half of 2016, in a note the same day. The payrolls figure “seems like an outlier” and bond valuations are “very stretched” Garzarelli, who is based in London, wrote.

Goldman being Goldman is like a shark being a shark. You can’t change one’s nature.

This thing is a complete scam, a denizen of perfidy if I’ve ever seen one. But like our election process, the Bitcoin is benefitting from the lesser of two evils: fake fucking digital currency for drug dealers and money launderers vs ponzi scheme national currencies, used for the manipulation of world assets on a scale never seen before.

Choose one.

As such, bitcoin is rifling higher by 3% this evening, stretching 1 year gains to 114%.

The only way to play it, via the stock market, is through GBTC.

The rabid animals who bought Japanese stocks last week are getting rocked tonight. This has nothing to do with the events that transpired in Orlando, FL by the scum and filth of the earth, but instead the abject and continued failure of the Bank of Japan’s efforts to spur inflation via negative rates.

Do a fucking google search for safety deposit box sales in Japan. They’re surging.

The samurais aren’t buying bullshit stocks into an earnings recession, as the NIKKEI slides further into the muck of an onerous year to date correction.

The yen-carry trade continues to unravel. The higher the yen goes versus the dollar, the more pressure applied to institutions who’ve borrowed in yen to buy stocks resonates.

I don’t mean to scare you. I realize I’ve been talking extreme shit since the beginning of 2016. But do all of you realize how fucked everything is? I’ll editorialize for a minute, taking a break from my Walter Cronkite swag. This is a completely fucked scenario. With European and Japanese central banks diving deeper into negative yielding rates, the world sinks into the deflationary vortex. It’s only thanks to the grace of God that markets haven’t dislocated and ripped out from the fucking sockets yet, with all things considered. I find nothing, zero, redeemable about a market where all of the major market participants are saddled with  outrageous sized debts and declining earnings and growth, only buoyed by the explicit manipulation of its assets, via the creation of money by their fucked central banks.

Back to catering to my french martini.

In the past, these events had little to no bearing on markets. It takes a lot more than a terrorist attack to scare Americans out of their stocks. Like guns, it would take death to separate most Americans from their stocks.

Gold is higher by 0.27%.

Last week I summed up with a warning that we were at overbought levels for several important sectors of the market, namely semis and Asia.

On Friday, I alerted members to a possible oversold condition occurring in the generic drug sector. The oscillator is approaching levels that it has bounced from in the past.

Earlier in the week, I initiated positions in a sundry of gold positions, representing 25% of a $100k account. I try to keep it simple and super transparent for people following my ideas and trades.

We didn’t close oversold. We didn’t close overbought. It was a bad week for stocks, but not horrible. There is a distinct chance that we bounce off Friday’s closing points and vomit up the rest of the week. Truth be told, the future is unclear.

This is one of those blackout periods when trading a lot fucks people. Since everything is in flux, especially after the terror attack in Florida, I would expect more of the same tomorrow, a resumption of the risk off trade into gold and bonds.

With the 50% cash remaining in my account, I intend to allocate it in tranches, upon an Exodus oversold signal, into SPY. We haven’t seen one for a few months, so its been a little quiet.

My gut tells me it’s about to get a lot more colorful around here soon.

Dr. Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar spoke at the Husseini Islamic Center, located on the outskirts of Orlando, back in April of this year.

In the video featured below, the good Dr. very flippantly says a death sentence for gays isn’t something to be embarrassed about and how we must rid ourselves of them now, out of compassion.

This is exactly the sort of 8th century backward thinking that shapes and incites the feeble minded fuckheads, like Omar Mateen, into carrying acts of terror in the name of religion or a perverted distortion of a world view.

This is commonplace in the Middle East, a dark place where goats have more rights than women and gays.

The deranged homophobe, who murdered 50 people in a Floridian club last night, was abusive to his former wife, learned from statements from her father in law and herself.

He’d go home and strike her for not having the laundry done in time, because he was a psychopathic, socially awkward, loser–who lashed out because his moronic vision for the world wasn’t being realized. Plus, he was likely a closet homosexual with erectile dysfunction.

“After three or four months she was abused by him and then we went and picked her up from there,” the ex-wife’s father told the Daily News at a New Jersey home. He asked not to be identified because he feared for the family’s safety.

“We even called cops to pick up her belongings.”

The ex-wife is now living with her fiance in Colorado and has had “nothing to do with” Mateen for years, her father said.

Omar Mateen is the lone suspect in America’s deadliest mass shooting.

Omar Mateen is the lone suspect in America’s deadliest mass shooting.

The former spouse told the Washington Post Mateen was “not a stable person.”

After they met online and married about eight years ago, he repeatedly beat her while they lived together in Florida, she said.

“He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that,” said the ex-wife, who also asked not to be identified.