Ted Cruz, the Goldman Sachs candidate, is well ahead of Trump, at 31,000 votes to Trump’s 27,000– with 75% of the votes in. Rubio is right behind Trump with 22% of the vote. Anyway you slice it, the invisibility of Trump has been dispatched tonight, despite the fact that Iowa is an utterly useless state.
Nevertheless, The Donald is going to need to start spending more money on his campaign. Thus far, he’s used his star-power as an excuse to run it like an popsicle stand–running a misery campaign with a skeleton crew. If Trump doesn’t win in New Hampshire, he will need to really start using his net worth to crush all of his enemies.
On the dem side, Clinton holds a razor thin lead over Sander, 50-49%, with 77% in.
Ted Cruz has jumped ahead of Trump with just 7% of precincts reporting. On the democrat side, Hillary is taking Sanders to the woodshed, up 53% to 47% with 27% of the precincts reporting.
Dennis Gartman, obviously feeling his oats for making some accurate crude oil market calls, is firing confederate shots at T. Boone Pickens’ bullish call on crude oil. Gartman is a super bear now and cites the lack of insolation in Siberian oil pipelines as a reason why Russian oil will continue to flow–in order to prevent those pipes from busting loose (Serious shit, I am not making this up. He really said that).
At any rate, Gartman is the new King of crude oil, in dollar terms, as well as yen, and he’s letting T. Boone know what the deal is–dropping some knowledge on thew 87 year old oil man.
In a hilarious comedy skit, Cramer tried to sound impartial to the political process this evening, by practically begging Janet Yellen to initiate QE4, or send strong signals that the Fed will not hike rates, so that Trump or Sanders don’t get elected.
He feels either candidates will be extremely harmful to Wall Street.
He delves into the Fed’s policy and how awful a job Yellen is doing, quizzing their ridiculous stance against inflation when in fact it doesn’t exist.
In short, elect Hillary Clinton for the sake of Wall Street (rolls eyes so hard, they fell out of my head).
Wall Street is leaning heavy to the GOP this election season, mainly due to Dodd-Frank, which took away Goldman Sach’s ability to bank huge coin. Thus far, many of the donations went to the Bush dynasty, like morons. If Trump wins, all of their money will be flushed down the republican toilet, as The Donald is hugely belligerent towards the GOP, China and Wall Street in general.
On the DNC side, Morgan Stanley are huge Hillary fans.
The tribal people of Iowa are about to become relevant again, an American tradition that stubbornly repeats itself every 4 years. The favorites are Trump and Hillary Clinton.
All of the candidates are complete bullshit, corrupt and disgusting people trying to hoodwink a retarded public into entrusting them with the nuclear football.
I really can’t get fired up over this game of smoke and mirrors. To me, politics is just another ploy to pit ordinary Americans against one another–getting us fired up to hate one another over meaningless topics that do not affect our lives in anyway, whatsoever. Even if these topics did affect us, it’s not like any of these candidates could effect change through an egregiously corrupted and controlled congress.
I’ll be reporting the results throughout the night and perhaps posting some video clips of the assholes who are trying to win.
It was a big day for paradigm shifts. Facebook overtook Berkshire Hathaway and Exxon for the #4 spot; and after crushing earnings this evening, GOOGL is now more valuable than Tim “I’m Still Gay” Cook’s Apple.
NOTE: S. Jobs is rolling over in his grave.
Shares of GOOGL are ripping higher, up more than $40 to $815.
For the first time ever, Alphabet revealed its moonshot bets and operating income for their investment portfolio. They have become a modern day Berkshire Hathaway, essentially. But instead of investing in 20th century concepts, like soda pop and industrial companies, they’re focused on high tech.
The results, reported for the first time under a new structure that separates Google’s main search and advertising operations from riskier investments, show that fourth-quarter revenue, excluding sales passed on to partners, rose 19 percent to $17.3 billion. That exceeded analysts’ average projection for $16.9 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Profit, before certain items, was $8.67 a share, beating the prediction for $8.08.
Google, which has been investing in artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and health technology, changed its name and structure last year to give investors a clearer view into the performance of its Web business and the money Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page is devoting to new projects. The health of Google’s main business and investor confidence in the company’s ability to innovate has helped to more than double the stock price in the past three years.
“It’s a very healthy bottom-line beat,” said Josh Olson, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. “This new transparency is going to help. The core business looks very healthy. That’s going to build investors’ confidence about the other bets they’ve been making.”
The new structure is designed to accelerate Google’s forays into other businesses beyond ad sales, by giving the newer divisions more flexibility. The shift to Alphabet has also given more freedom to top executives who would otherwise want to run their own companies. Investors also learned how expensive the company’s futuristic ambitions are. Alphabet’s “Other Bets” category had an operating loss of $3.57 billion for the year, widening from $1.94 billion in 2014, while revenue from these units rose 37 percent to $448 million in 2015.
The new structure has also given more to autonomy to Google’s main business under CEO Sundar Pichai. He has devoted resources to buffing up Google’s ad products, introducing new formats while improving the delivery and accuracy of targeted marketing spots. A key challenge is to control spending on initiatives to boost traffic, which are aimed at making up for declining ad prices on mobile devices. Total clicks on ads were up 31 percent in the latest period, even as the average price for an ads on Google’s websites fell 16 percent.
Alphabet’s other bets span everything from robotics and Internet-beaming balloons to self-driving cars and health-care research. While they are mainly costs that are supported by Google’s search-ad operations, they have the potential for long-term growth, according to Ivan Feinseth, chief investment officer of Tigress Financial Partners LLC, who has a buy rating on the stock.
Allegedly, the market rallied today after Fed’s Fischer’s comments, sounding like a buffoon who first discovered fire and its heating elements. Oil remained in the doldrums and utilities led the way higher–hardly an inspiring trading session. With the Iowa caucuses looming this evening and the cancer of negative rates spreading around the world, ice cube marinator in Chief, Arthur Cashin, believes the Fed has–once again–painted themselves into a corner.
Cashin sums it up saying “tell me what the crude market is gonna do tomorrow and I’ll tell you where everything is going.”
Fed’s Fischer gave a hugely ridiculous speech today about the virtues of negative rates. He had the balls to praise Denmark for raising rates from -0.75% to -0.60%. Overall, he had nothing but good things to say about negative rates.
I talked about this yesterday: the negative rate environment is forming a bubble–one that is encouraged by more government borrowing. With over $5.5 trillion in government debt now trading with negative rates and the debt burden of sovereign governments on the rise, the sucker who will pay for all of this is the person reading this blog.
Because Visa and Mastercard are taking over the world, coupled with the stigma of cash, very soon–in your lifetime–you will pay your bank to house your money. As an investor in government bonds, you will pay your government to borrow your money–for the safety of it all.
No one thought a negative rate environment could last. Analysts said people would take their money out of banks and put it under their mattresses. Well, over in Europe, where this grande experiment was born, that is not happening.
Some people believe the Fed can eventually go negative, providing economic conditions don’t improve.
Stocks have done the unthinkable: they’ve decoupled from crude oil and reversed an egregious early morning drop. It’s wholly ridiculous, frankly. Stocks should be afraid of crude oil down 6% for the session. Instead of rallying, they should be pondering the ways a bankrupted U.S. oil industry will affect the overall economy.
Nevertheless, here we are with FB and Netflix leading the way towards prosperity.
Tomorrow I am selling out of my final purchase of SPY, done at $185.40.
God it pains me to offer nothing but tales of doom and death to equity buyers. But I haven’t seen anything worthwhile to get excited about yet.
