Back to the ‘The Mall is Dead’ Thesis; Gap Stores Clown Punches Lower on Earnings Comedy

So the company was supposed to come in with same store sales of +0.5%. Instead, the posted a -7% deficit.

Banana Republic sales were off by 7% for the month, while degenerate clothing chain Old Navy dove by -10%.

First-quarter sales totaled $3.44 billion, down 6 percent from $3.66 billion a year earlier.

The company now expects to earn 31 to 32 cents per share for the quarter. The average analyst estimate was for earnings of 44 cents per share on revenue of $3.54 billion, according to FactSet.

I realize there are some people out there who say ‘the mall isn’t dead. It’s merely resting and waiting for better merchants.’ But I view the collapse of these chains as a symptom of an economy that is providing people with less than ideal discretionary budgets. While jobs are being created, the quality of said jobs are an abomination. How else can you describe the divergence between jobs and retail sales?

Is Amazon truly capturing all market share, leaving traditional outlets to rot in hell?

GPS is down 13% in the after hours to a fresh 52 Week low.

Reports Q1 (Mar) earnings of $1.72 per share, $0.67 better than the Capital IQ Consensus of $1.05; revenues rose 85.7% year/year to $81.8 mln vs the $68.5 mln Capital IQ Consensus.
Co issues upside guidance for FY16, sees EPS of $6.00-6.50 vs. $5.28 Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; sees FY16 revs of $310-330 mln vs. $302.73 mln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate.
As a result of the strong free cash flow and the significant increase in the Company’s cash balance during the first quarter, on May 6, 2016 the board of directors elected to make an unrequired principal repayment of $10 million against the borrowings under the Company’s existing credit agreement related to the Endicia acquisition. Prior to this repayment, as of March 31, 2016 the total debt under the credit agreement excluding capitalized debt issuance costs was $162.4 million.

Chanos just highlighted during his #SOHN2016 sales pitch how Elon Musk was nothing more than a factory floor sleeping showman. He described the absurdity of SolarCity and Tesla and how the former would run into funding issues in 2016.

Lo and behold, one week hence, shares of SCTY are swimming lower after a offering investors truly horrendous guidance. For Q2, the company is guiding revenues down to $135-143 mill from $152 mill–sporting a loss of $2.80.

“While the regulatory clarity provided by California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York put many of last quarter’s headwinds behind us, we do not expect to be able to make up for the decline in MW booked in Q1 2016,” the company said in a statement.

Regarding the outlook, Rive said, “Looking ahead, we are recalibrating our outlook for the year after taking into account the regulatory developments that impacted Q1 2016 MW Booked and the impact of an increase in pricing for our commercial business. While the regulatory clarity provided by California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York put many of last quarter’s headwinds behind us, we do not expect to be able to make up for the decline in MW Booked in Q1 2016. In conjunction with the lower MW expected from higher pricing instituted in Q2 2016, we now expect to install 1.0 – 1.1 GW in 2016 as compared to 1.25 GW previously. For Q2 2016 we expect to install 185 MW, representing a decline of 2% year-over-year, largely due to the 14 MW project that was completed ahead of time in Q1 2016.

Shares are down 20% in after-hours.

The dynamics of this market are very clear. It cannot go up without the support of oil. When oil trades lower, so do the energy, industrial, and banking sectors.

That roughly constitutes around 50% of the market. When you take into account the earnings recession underway in tech, a sector maligned by earnings shortfalls, you get to truly understand why the market has a hard time rallying without crude.

Those sectors combined account for 70% of the market cap in this market. The only big sector left to allocate into is healthcare, which accounts for another 20%. Unfortunately, that’s been the worst performing sector of 2016.

Ergo, without the benefit of Canadian tar sands being held captive by an inferno, there’s very little reason to get excited about stocks.

Tonight, before you go to bed, pray and beg for the House of Saud to cut production. Otherwise, you and your ilk are going to be rooted and routed out of this market with ease.

The right wingers in North Carolina are foaming at the mouth, in an attempt to deny me of my rights to shave my beard inside the woman’s bathroom. Moreover, they’re trying to take away the hobbies of transgender lads/lassies, who enjoy moonlighting between the ladies and the men’s room.

“Oh Oscar, which restroom will you use tonight? I feel like a standing up pee inside the ladies room tonight.”

“The Obama administration is bypassing Congress by attempting to rewrite the law and set restroom policies for public and private employers across the country, not just North Carolina,” the governor said in his statement. “This is now a national issue that applies to every state and it needs to be resolved at the federal level.”

Lynch said in a news release that she would hold a news conference Monday afternoon “to provide an update on a law enforcement matter.”

North Carolina’s standoff with the federal government began in February, when the city council in Charlotte passed an ordinance allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice. State lawmakers called a special session and passed the bill in 12 hours on March 23.

Super gay companies like Target have already went apeshit and taken gender signs off the bathroom doors. They’re progressively positioning for a world when genders are passé, old hat. In the future, everyone will intermingle between genders. Detachable cocks will be sold at the front of Target, for those looking to partake.

The relics inside of the state of North Carolina are trying to deny the people of their God given right to change their sex. This, of course, cannot be tolerated. I am sure the Obama administration will take appopriate actions to ensure they’re justly punished.

The broader indices are looking better. Breadth is still anemic, at around 56%. The sole standout sector is biotech, higher by 3% for the day.

Some of the stocks within the sector are really jumping higher, many by double digits.

Why?

Random stuff. There was a weakness within the sector on Friday. Other than that, the biotech sector is up because there are more buyers than sellers. It is the quintessential risk sector, one that could ignore the superficialities of earnings and revenues. To buy a biotech is to buy a lotto ticket and a dream.

We have a whole ‘lota dreamers out there today.

The slide in copper, and metals as a whole, is starting to pick up in earnest.

Shares of the copper giant FCX are getting poleaxed, even after divesting their jungle mine in the Congo. As suspected, the market isn’t keen on the company selling too many assets at distressed prices.

Note the drop in palladium as well, which is a key tell for the automotive market. If the drop in copper is predictive in any way, expect to hear negative news out of China soon, whose market plunged by 2.7% last night.

The price action in the crude markets is beyond absurd. I envision a clown car rolling up at the exchange and then getting out and slapping each other in the face –in the pits– buying and selling WTI based off fire reports from Fort Mcmurray.

Canadian officials on Sunday showed some optimism as favourable weather helped fire fighters, driving the flames away from the oil sands town Fort McMurray, but there was no timeline for a restart of operations at evacuated sites.

I am sure there are some crude traders getting burned right now, who are actually disappointed the entirety of Fort Mcmurray didn’t end up in cinders.

Should a strong gust of wind materialize, shifting the fires back into the direction of the tar sands, expect to see the price of WTI jump again.

I’m not surprised, nor angry, by the story out from Gizmodo this morning– who interviewed a few Facebook whistleblowers that worked on the very popular news section–claiming the company regularly injected a liberal bias into their news stream.

I suppose people assumed Facebook’s algorithms did all the work, when in fact human bias plays a significant role in choosing which stories get featured on the social media site.

If any of you thought Zuckerberg’s bias wouldn’t permeate his website, you’re nuts.

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.

“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter.”

In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his support for the movement in an internal memo chastising Facebook employees for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans on the company’s internal “signature wall.”)

When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”

Truth be told, this is damning news for the Facebook brand. Although I’m cynical and believe everyone is as crooked as Hillary, many people trust Facebook to deliver unbiased ‘trending’ topics. These miscreants are nothing more than hacks toiling away, venting their frustrations out through their biases.

Facebook, like most media companies in America, are nothing more than propaganda arms for the government.

I bet this fucking story won’t trend on Facebook.

Apparently, some assholes in China took out ads, claiming to have a surgical cure for cancer. A 21 yr old student with cancer took them up on the offer and died as a result. As such, a firestorm erupted over the wanton depravity and savagery taking place on the BIDU search engine. Government officials have caved into the public pressures and have placed restrictions on the amount of lying that is permitted to take place online.

The restrictions mean the company must clean up in-search healthcare adverts and paid-for search adverts of any kind cannot only be based on the highest bidder, a statement from the internet, industry and health regulators which was posted on the website of the Cyberspace Administration of China said.

Such adverts must be restricted to no more than 30 percent of a page of search results, the statement said.

“If they do enforce that, it would likely significantly cut into revenues,” said Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting.

A spokeswoman for Baidu said it accepted the regulator’s decision and will firmly implement the requirements on it following the in-search adverts investigation.

Baidu has come in for fierce online criticism for how it handles adverts within its search results.

Before his death, 21-year-old student Wei Zexi not only criticized the military-run hospital that provided the failed treatment for misleading claims about its effectiveness but also alleged that Baidu, which controls 80 percent of the Chinese search market, had promoted false medical information.

Shares of BIDU are lower by $9 or 5% in the premarket.