CRAP

Janet Yellen is always one step behind.  If people start to ask you "Are you fat?", then you ARE fat!

Recall that it was Goldman's David Kostin who in January admitted that "The S&P500 Is Now Overvalued By Almost Any Measure." It was then when the Goldman chief strategist admitted there was only 3% upside to the bank's year end target of 1900.  Well, that hasn't changed. In his latest note Kostin says that "S&P 500 now trades at 16.1x forward 12-month consensus EPS and 16.5x our top-down forecast... the only time S&P 500 traded at a higher multiple than today was during the 1997-2000 Tech bubble when margins were 25% (250 bp) lower than today. S&P 500 also trades at high EV/sales and EV/EBITDA multiples relative to history. The cyclically-adjusted P/E ratio suggests S&P 500 is now 30%-45% overvalued compared with the average since 1928." And this is where Goldman just goes apeshit full retard: "we lift our year-end 2014 S&P 500 price target to 2050 (from 1900) and 12-month target to 2075, reflecting prospective returns of 4% and 6%, respectively."

Wait, what???

The venture capital world is currently paying inordinate amounts of money for software companies which are making a lot of noise and not much else!

Will investing based on fundamentals eventually find favor once again with investors? The problem is that market participants no longer view the financial markets as a place to invest savings over the "long term" to ensure future purchasing power parity. Today, they view the markets as a place to "create" wealth to offset the lack of savings. This mentality has changed the market dynamic from investing to gambling. As Seth Klarman warned, "There is a growing gap between the financial markets and the real economy. Not surprisingly, lessons learned in 2008 were only learned temporarily. These are the inevitable cycles of greed and fear, of peaks and troughs." Simply put, fundamentals will matter, but only after the fact.

Felix Zulauf, James Montier and David Iben: Three legendary investors share their views on financial markets. Everything is pricey ("we will continue to swim in a sea of liquidity; but there might be other events and developments that may not be camouflaged by liquidity which could cause a change of investor expectations.") the European periphery is a bubble ("The Euro crisis is not over...the European economies are not going to change for the better for years to come despite all the cheating and breaking of laws"), Value investors need to venture to Russia ("when you look at today’s opportunity set, you’re left with a set of assets where nothing looks attractive from a valuation point of view") or buy gold mining stocks (" The down cycle could be much bigger than anybody believes if the market realizes that all the actions taken in recent years do not work.") Summing it all up, "there is no question that [sovereigns] lack the fundamental economic base to finally service their debts," trade accordingly.

"The challenges of managing student loan debt can lead some borrowers to fall behind on their loan payments and in some cases even default on their debt obligation," notes the always astute White House... and so it's time to do something about that... by bailing the bad debtors out with US taxpayers money. As we have been vociferously warning, not only has the student loan debt bubble expanded massively (as the easiest credit substitute for real-world working and unemployment) but delinquencies on the 'easily available' credit is soaring with "consequences such as a damaged credit rating, losing their tax refund, or garnished wages." Consequences, as we have been taught now, are not acceptable for this administration and so President Barack Obama will issue an executive action on Monday aimed at making it easier for young people to avoid trouble repaying student loans.

Having suffered a dismal confidence-sapping defeat in last weekend's elections, Francois Hollande's French government is at the center of another embarrassing faux pas this morning. Somewhat famously, Hollande has raised income tax, VAT and corporation tax since he was elected two years ago... and government forecast EUR30bn of extra tax income. As The BBC reports, the actual amount gained... EUR16bn (leaving a EUR14bn black hole) and forcing The Court of Auditors to proclaim that "forecasts of tax revenue in 2013 were so wildly inaccurate that they cast doubt on its forecasts for this year." Mon Dieu... they lied?

With the Fed having tapered its liquidity injections into the stock market from $85 billion to "only" $45 billion per month, retail investors getting burned by the recent high beta and momentum stock flame out and "greatly unrotating" into the renewed safety of bonds, not to mention a churning market that until last week was unchanged for the year, and hedge funds ever shorter into this latest ramp, many are asking themselves: who is buying?

Here is the answer.

It was just last Friday when we updated our list of the most hated, i.e., most shorted, stocks which are so critical in the New Normal because as we have reported constantly since 2012, going long the most shorted names remains the best alpha-generating strategy, outperforming the broader market by orders of magnitude. Today, it is Bloomberg's turn to recap just how broken the market is with an article that highlights the "balance sheet bombs" rallying by 94%. The lede: "In the U.S. equity market, the worse a company’s finances, the better it’s doing." Because there is nothing like rewarding failure and capital misallocation to promote economic growth and employment recovery.

There’s a long and comprehensive To-Do list that has been waiting for us since at least 2008, when the nation received one forceful blow upside its thick head. We refuse to pay attention.

In the Oval Orfice...

Owners of high-growth, high-beta stocks could not find a buyer for any of their crap today some mid-afternoon shenanigans between AUDJPY, VIX, and more utterly useless Russian headlines meant those same owners of high-growth, high-beta stocks were beating buyers away with a shitty stick. Pandora is a great example of the chaos (today's swings down 2%, up 4%, down 11%, then up 6%) as today's action in the so-called "market" was anything but human. The buying panic lifted the S&P, Dow, and Trannies briefly into the green for April but very late-day weakness left only the Trannies green for April.  We just hope the desperate BTFWWIII'ers didn't use up all their BTFTuesday ammo...

A ‘Perfect Storm’ of demography and debt will economically and financially doom almost every country on earth. It will be TEOTWAWKI – ‘The End Of The World As We Know It’. No, it’s not the end of life or even the end of civilization. However, when it’s all over, nothing will ever be the same and that includes the disappearance of much of the middle class.  The good news - The storm won’t last forever. The bad news is there will be much more pain before it ends unless you make an effort to understand what’s happening and why.

So much hope, so much faith, so much euphoria that the early bounce in high beta crap, which sent biotechs by more than 3%, would finally stick... All for nothing.

We all know what will eventually unfold: another collapse, this one even worse than that of 2008. Until then, the fraud and fiction will continue. Everyone with a vested interest in stocks moving up will do everything they can to perpetuate this.