After Hours

Wondering what is causing the quicksand under HP stock after hours? Nothing more and nothing less than what we have been predicting, namely that on its public call had such a bullish outlook on the economy, has been warning internally of that another "tough quarter" is coming. "The company’s existing headcount plans are “unaffordable given the pressures on our business,” Apotheker wrote in the May 4 memo to deputies including Todd Bradley, executive vice president of the personal systems business, and Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak. The memo was obtained by Bloomberg. “Q3 is going to be another tough quarter, one in which we will be driving hard for revenue and profit,” Apotheker wrote. “We have absolutely no room for profitless revenue or any discretionary expenditures." And now the deluge of real, and very much deferred profit warnings, is about to hit Wall Street like a redirected Mississippi river.

Equities continued their path of convergence to credit's recently weak signals today as we saw the largest compression between debt and equity in two months. Up-in-quality and up-in-capital structure very evident as single-name vol rose notably.

For those who thought Google was simply a search engine and ad company, I strongly suggest that you read on - Cars, home automation, the leading smartphone OS, toys, TV, music, movies, enterprise computing... It's getting serious folk!

Just like yesterday and the day before, 6:30pm is now the official precious metal "bang the afterhours" launch time. As we predicted minutes ago, silver just got taken to the cleaners on what is now an apparent attempt to push silver around in the no volume part of after hours trading, in the 6-7 pm no man's land. We expect an imminent rebound after this latest attempt to trigger stop losses, probably those around $40, fails. If it succeeds in pushing silver below $40 it is very possible that the metal can promptly trade down to the mid $30s as a result. And while banging the close has been investigated by the CFTC for years (resulting in some modest smacks on the wrist recently for the ex-Moore trader who did this with impunity), we are confident it won't be before 2015 that the CFTC's commissioners investigate this particularly odd behavior in silver and gold. By then it, of course, won't matter.

DJ NYSE Reviewing Possible Bad After-Hours Trades In Many Stocks

PM Eastern Daylight Time May 02, 2011 (MORE TO FOLLOW) Dow Jones Newswires

Were they known as, sales? And in other news, Gold just plunged by $30 for no reason whatsoever. Flash crashes for everyone!

As competition that is as inevitable as gravity itself both validates our contrarian thesis and causes Research in Motion’s stock to imitate amateur base jumpers, sans parachute…

One wonders just what algo told the IWM to not only lift every offer but to do so for a whopping 10% higher than the overall market. Because if you like this market about 50% overpriced, you will love it at 60%. Or was this just Brian Sack telegraphing what the endgoal for the Russell 2000 is before QE2 ends? In other news does anyone even recall what a capital market is like without at least one Chinese fraud being exposed, or at least one synthetic CDO, read ETF, doing some Circque De Soleil acrobatics? We can't wait to hear what the exchanges will use as an excuse for this inverse flash crash.

• Diluted EPS:
  • GAAP: $2.31, up 17 percent;
  • Operating (non-GAAP): $2.41, up 21 percent; Consensus of $2.30
• Revenue: $24.6 billion, up 8 percent, up 5 percent adjusting for
  currency; Consensus of $24.0 billion
• Gross profit margin:
  • GAAP: 44.1 percent, up 0.5 points; Below consensus of 44.6%
  • Operating (non-GAAP): 44.5 percent, up 0.8 points;
• Cloud revenue 5 times first-quarter 2010 revenue;
• Full-year 2011 Operating (non-GAAP) EPS expectations raised to at
  least $13.15 from at least $13.00.

Contrarian, yet common sense, perspectives on Apple that so few seem able to see.

I warned, in detail, that Research in Motion was a strong short due to waning market share and margin compression in January. RIM warns of the EXACT SAME risks as it lowers guidance earlier today. For all of those optimists in the stock, this is just the beginning - for RIM and its competitors as well. Mobile computing will soon be a commodity business like desktop computers.

This is not "Commie talk" people. If you are not one of the Forbes 400 you are either a victim or a victim-in-waiting because what do you think the 400 will do when the bottom 90% are bled dry?

And just as the regular trading session, which is now obviously composed exlusively of the occasional bipolar lunatic and a whole lot of 'buy only' algorithms, levitated stocks above the inferno of Japanese reality, so the after hours session provides a convenient buffer for all those who have access to daily ES trading to take advantage of old mom and pop who are stuck with their IBM shares until tomorrow's gap down, and reintroduce gravity to the equation. Behold afterhours futures trading, er, sliding. Japan opens in an hour and a half. Bring your fireman's helmet.

Confirming, yet again, that MIT Ph.D.'s (such as the FRBNY's Brian Sack) are among the most dangerous around, a paper made the rounds yesterday by one Josef Oehmen titled: "Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors." In the ensuing 48 hours, anyone who listened to Josef's advice (who incidentally is not a scientist) and was also "not worried about the reactors" has paid an exorbitant price, possibly up to and including their lives. We demand that MIT School of Nuclear Science and Engineering clarify their position on the matter, and make sure that incidents such as this, where Oehmen's paper received top billing due to its perceived "endorsement" by MIT and has since been completely discredited, never recur.

More facts that support the ascension of a new order in mobile computing...

Tech darling FNSR is plummeting after hours, down by $14, or 35%, to $26 after the company released in line Q3 numbers, but an outlook that has left the investor base, not to mention its sellside lemming brigade, stunned. While the current sellside Q4 consensus is of 48 cents a share on revenue of $257.9 million, the company announced that "revenues for the fourth quarter to be in the range of

$235 to $250 million" and "earnings per diluted share is expected to

be in the range of approximately $0.31 to $0.35." The result: a stock that is down 33% after hours. Perhaps it is time form Miller Tabak's Alex Henderson, who has been ranked #1 11 times in the Institutional Investor "All Star" poll, to reduce his $60/Buy Price Target. Yet what is worst is that perpetual tech dynamo, China, is now growing dim: from the mea culpa: "the Company will be

impacted by...a slowdown in business in China

overall." Is this the beginning of the end for the tech bubble?