Futures Dive as Yen Advance Continues

Dow futures are off by 45, as the yen breaks 108 to the dollar. The NIKKEI is plunging lower by 1.4%, diverging from the corrupted Shanghai–which is higher by 1.67% on inflation data.

Heading into the trading week, all eyes will be on the Yen, even more than oil. You have to understand, upwards of 30% of all sovereign bond yields are negative. The consensus has been, hitherto, that negative yields would produce a weaker currency and more inflation. Being on the front lines of this experiment in central bank overplanning, the Bank of Japan officials are having an increasingly arduous time explaning the 11% gain in the Yen v the dollar for 2016.

Should this experiment fail, through the explicit and pervasive strenghtening of the Yen, I suspect a similar trade will appear in Europe, at which point world equity markets would be hamstrung by debilitating losses.

My bias is abundantly clear. This will not work. Ergo, being long treasuries, aka ‘The Ark’, will produce the safest and most effective measure of returns for the forseeable future.

NOTE: SPY futs are off by 2.5–panic and blood are flowing through the streets.

Why else would Obama and Biden bother to meet Yellen? I mean, really. All politics aside, the only outcome for ‘Wall Street reform’, that needs to be talked about with the clubbed sandwich eating Yellen, is for onerous tidings to sweep across the industry. A redistribution is in order, sacking the capricious pay packages of our elite, tossed into the everlasting infernos of the government’s barrels filled with refuse.

“In the afternoon, the president will meet with Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to discuss the state of the American and global economy, Wall Street reform, and the long-term economic outlook; the vice president will also attend,” the statement said.

I wonder what Yellen will order at this heinous event? Perhaps a meated loaf on rye? Or maybe she’ll go with the egg’d salad, hold the vinegar, because her doctor told her it aggravates her flatulance.

What sort of fucking world is this, when a tabloid, piece of shit newspaper, whose stock has fallen by 24% over the past year vies to bid for one of America’s premier internet hubs?

What idiot private equity guy thinks this a good idea? I feel like I’m living in Alice in Wonderland. News media hacks are just reporting this shit like it makes sense.

‘Oh well, it looks like Joe Nuclear from the S. Bronx wants to buy all of America’s nuclear silos. We might as well report it.’

No. I don’t think so. Yahoo is fucking 15x bigger than the Daily Mail, an offal of a newspaper, the supreme shit of Great Britain.

This isn’t a serious news story; because it will never happen. That’s the way it should be reported.

What does it all mean? Could it portend to the very end of the EU, due to a BREXIT and subsequent GREXIT? Surely, the specter of such a thing has to keep bond holders up at night. Imagine the fuckery that would transpire if Portugal, Italy, Spain and Greece were no longer sucking from the tit of Germany. It would be an apocalyptic event of the first order.

These affairs are still very much far-fetched and yields are still incredibly low. But it begs your attention, as you promenade about your gated communities, picking up the shit from your neatly groomed poodles.

Last trading week marked the closing of my 10 day position in the S&P 500, via SPY. As noted in the Exodus blog, this position was taken on March the 24th at $202.15 and ended on this past Friday @ $205.21.

While not enough to festoon my bedroom with the inner–parts of my mortal enemies, the trade did almost precisely what I expected, which was to offer and deliver a small incremental increase to my account.

In addition to that, I closed out some of my XLE short last Monday. Once again, the position was taken 10 days prior when it was flagged to be overbought by the Exodus algorithms.

I have but one of the original three tranches of XLE remaining on my books. The balance of this purposeful $100k account, used to demonstrate the usefulness of the Exodus Market Intelligence Platform, has been placed in TLT until the yield curve inverts–which has been my core thesis from the beginning of the New Year. There is also a 50% cash position in my account, at the present time.

Here is my pnl, thus far.

Where do we go from here? Well, as a matter of fact, there is something actionable that flagged on Friday, in which I will be taking action on first thing Monday morning. To find out, you misers are just going to have to part with some of your beloved currencies and to join the halls of gentlemen.

See you there.

What has occurred at Sears over the past decade, at the hands of asshole hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert, is a travesty.

Now that it’s end game for the company and it is no longer able to continue as a viable business, Lampert and friends are swooping in to provide “loans” to the company, in exchange for first lien on its most prized properties.

Cascade Investment has funded $125 million of a $500 million loan that Sears raised by using about 20 of its mortgaged properties as collateral, the retailer said Friday in a statement. Another $125 million for the loan maturing in July 2017 was provided by ESL Investments, which is controlled by Lampert.

Sears said it already drew the $250 million that was financed by Cascade and ESL. The two investment firms will provide some or all of the next $250 million available on the loan facility that isn’t syndicated to other loan investors, according to the statement.

The company should be liquidated and that asshole Lampert should be broken by what he’s done to this once proud retailer. Instead, I get the feeling he’s gonna walk away from this ahead.

FYI: Cascade handles investments for Bill Gates.

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%