Archive - Oct 2010

The Pentagon is not too happy this morning. As the AP reports, WikiLeaks is about to release what the Pentagon fears is the largest cache of secret U.S. documents in history — hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports compiled after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While WikiLeaks has not commented on the imminent announcement, it tweeted earlier that there is "major WikiLeaks press conference in Europe coming up." And as this disclosure would be the "most massive leak of secret documents in U.S. history" defense officials are racing to contain the damage. As a reminder WikiLeaks' last release of Adghanistan war logs made founder Julian Assange some of a persona non grata in most of the developed world. Of course, the buzz about who may be behind Wikileaks still seems to circulate every now and then. Additionally, Wiki advised interested parties who wish to book the announcement in advance to email the following address, sunshine.booking@mail.be, which however appears to be a broken one. Of course, it merely adds to the "mystery." Regardless, we will follow this and present wiki's findings as they become available.

In the wake of the sovereign debt crisis, Europe has chosen to respond with measures of austerity as various euro-zone countries pledge to cut spending dramatically in order to bring their respective budget deficits down to a few percentage points of GDP apiece. These measures also come in the much bigger wake of the credit crisis of 2008. Even more severe is the United Kingdom’s recently revealed plan to cut £81 billion or a sum equivalent to 4.5% of projected GDP and characterized by the FT as “the most drastic budget cuts in living memory, outstripping measures taken by other advanced economies which are also under pressure to sharply reduce spending.” In fact, the UK’s public sector will lose 500,000 jobs as a result of these cuts. The United States, on the other hand, is favoring stimulus to austerity by maintaining near-zero rates and planning another round of quantitative easing or the buying of longer-term Treasury securities to flood the system with liquidity. The exact amount and timing of QE2 is unknown, but it comes on top of the $1.7 trillion pushed into the system by the Fed starting in 2009.

• The real stock rally killer: Analysis: Bush tax cuts might just expire after all (Reuters)
• Bondholder `Immunity' to Losses Challenged as Irish Bail Banks (Bloomberg)
• Fed's Hoenig: Further Easing Poses Risk To Nascent US Recovery (WSJ)
• Fed's Bullard Favors Open-Ended Bond Purchases (MarketWatch)
• Ohio AG: foreclosure probe won't stop post-election (Reuters)
• False expectations: The historic infrastructure investment that wasn’t  (Economist)
• Democrats slam another campaign opponent: China (Reuters)

• Asian stocks rise as US earnings, Jobless claims boost growth optimism.
• California plans to sell $10B of notes in mid-November to pay bills.
• Fed's Bullard proposed the central bank buy $100B in long-term Treasuries in Nov.
• German two-year government note yield rises to 1%, first time since April.
• Gold set for first weekly decline in six as Dollar's strength cuts appeal.
• Hoenig says US economy is in recovery and 'growing modestly'.
• AIG said to raise $17.8B as AIA unit completes record Hong Kong IPO.

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 22/10/10

Support and Resistance PowerZones for the Russell 2000 (TF Dec), Nymex Crude (CL Dec) and Comex Gold (GC Dec). These zones are created by combining multiple support and resistance methods including Volume Profile, Elliott Wave, Fibonacci, Pivot Points, Trend lines and Market Profile amongst others.

Here’s a little cross pollination to attract bears from all over. Karl Deninger, the editor of the Market Ticker, invited me over for a half hour chat on his Blog Talk Radio show to discuss things such as foreclosure fraud, banks, derivative risk and the markets. You can access the original airing podcast on Karl’s site. I have taken the liberty to append some graphics to the background to add some information to the discussion (see below). Enjoy!

Retail traders are notoriously wrong at picking market direction/tops and bottoms. Most retail traders very naturally seem to adopt a counter-trend stance and this offers very accurate signals for individuals looking to trade against this group. This daily report is designed to help traders focus their efforts on higher probability pairs. So what are the signals?

After repeated admonitions from Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and even President Obama to engage in more Keynesian stimulus, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel firmly rejected those demands and had the gall to suggest that such policies weren't right for Germany. Now she has the last laugh as Germany is recovering and we slip back into recession.

The biggest story today for video rental/video streaming company Netflix was not its parabolic move higher on earnings that left many scratching their heads, but that the company's exposure of just how vulnerable, and potentially unprepared, to growing pains it is, after its website suffered a multi-hour outage preventing clients (both paying and free) from accessing any streaming movies. And the company, which is betting if not the ranch, the definitely its cash flow on the transition to streaming (in Q3 it spent $115 million on video streaming rights, an 11-fold increase from the same time last year) may very well be unprepared for the priced in exponential growth in new users (even more so since as we pointed out earlier, the bulk of the expansion is to non-paying customers). The reason, as AP pointed out earlier, is that Netflix's streaming service has become so popular that it is now the
largest source of U.S. Internet traffic during peak evening hours. Streaming
by Netflix subscribers accounted for about one-fifth of that peak-time
traffic, more than double the volume flowing from Google Inc.'s YouTube. And this massive infrastructure is supported by... $120 million in PP&E!? Indicatively Google is almost $5 billion. And since the market is expecting continued parabolic growth to its existing customer base of 15.9 million paid users to validate the new business model to which it attributes a lofty 30x+ PE of 2012 Earnings (a deja vu of the dot com days of "story stocks"), the company will soon have no choice but to actually expand its seemingly underfunded infrastructure, which it currently carries at $125 million on its books. Unless, of course, it wants to lose exasperated clients with an ultra short attention span who demand instant gratification and who can easily find substitute streaming providers in these days of Hulu (which itself is about to IPO), and numerous cable channel hosted alternatives. The big problem is that with $8 million of non GAAP free cash flow as disclosed in its Q3 earning release, there is no way this expansion can be funded organically.  Furthermore, as the company is currently below its self-disclosed cash floor level, is the only option for Netflix to come out with a follow on offering, and fast? What that would do to a stock that has under $200 million in book equity and almost $9 billion in market cap we leave to our readers' imagination.

A funny thing happened on the way to the frontrun today as after a huge opening driven by slightly positive relative macro data and NFLX's jizztacular earnings, the market dove on no real discernible news other than maybe investors waking up to just about EVERY FUCKING PIECE OF ECONOMIC DATA released in the last few years (though highly unlikely).

We are entering a major secular bull market in food, as the world is making people faster than the food to feed them. A 175,000 new customers a day. When push comes to shove in the global economy, the commodities you have to have are the grains. The Scottish reverend Thomas Malthus must be smiling from his grave. (CORN), (AGU), (MOS).

A woman goes to a party or is promiscuous and sleeps with 6 men in a night or week. The following week she is pregnant. Who is the daddy?

D'oh!

To Whom It May Concern,

I have a question. Why does the SEC allow high frequency traders/co-location traders/etc., to front run retail orders every day in almost every security? When I say front run, I mean the practice of utilizing sub-penny orders whereby these so called traders step in front of real bids and offers by 1/100th of a penny to get the trade done, knowing there's a bid or offer right behind them. This has happened to me at least fifty times in the last year. It is particularly a problem on illiquid issues in which the sub-penny order that front runs my orders may be the only business done at that level. And so my order just sits there and never gets filled.