NASDAQ

This is easily the meatiest, most offensive, most controversial and probably the most hardhitting post of the year. Here's proof that Goldman STUFFED ITS MUPPET clients!!! 20 pgs of research warning non-muppet clients to back off, proof of the Muppet biz model...

Can this last?

What a quarter! The Dow up 8% and enjoying a record quarter in terms of points — 994 of them to be exact and in percent terms, now just 7% off attaining a new all-time high. The S&P 500 surged 12% (and 3.1% for March; 28% from the October 2011 lows), which was the best performance since 1998. It seems so strange to draw comparisons to 1998, which was the infancy of the Internet revolution; a period of fiscal stability, 5% risk-free rates, sustained 4% real growth in the economy, strong housing markets, political stability, sub-5% unemployment, a stable and predictable central bank. And look at the composition of the rally. Apple soared 48% and accounted for nearly 20% of the appreciation in the S&P 500. But outside of Apple, what led the rally were the low-quality names that got so beat up last year, such as Bank of America bouncing 72% (it was the Dow's worst performer in 2011; financials in aggregate rose 22%). Sears Holdings have skyrocketed 108% this year even though the company doesn't expect to make money this year or next. What does that tell you? What it says is that this bull run was really more about pricing out a possible financial disaster coming out of Europe than anything that could really be described as positive on the global macroeconomic front. What is most fascinating is how the private client sector simply refuses to drink from the Fed liquidity spiked punch bowl, having been burnt by two central bank-induced bubbles separated less than a decade apart leaving David Rosenberg, of Gluskin Sheff, still rightly focused on benefiting from his long-term 3-D view of deleveraging, demographics, and deflation - as he notes US data is on notably shaky ground. This appears to have been very much a trader's rally as he reminds us that liquidity is not an antidote for fundamentals.

Overnight, the NYT's Nicholas Kristof penned an article which exposes Goldman, already deeply embroiled in muppetgate damage control, as being a 16% indirect owner in Backpage, an "emporium for girls and women - some under age or forced into prostitution... which has 70 percent of the market for prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a trade organization." " Yet some may be surprised to learn that this is not the firm's only expansion into the world of monetized prostitution. As the chart below shows, as of Q4, 2011, the firm also happens to be the top ten owner of Adult Friend Finder (Nasdaq: FFN), a company which recently went public, and which is nothing more than a porn portal for women, who can sell their "assets" to the highest bidder.

It seems like yesterday that to much pomp and circumstance, Groupon came public. We can only hope that anyone who bought into the public offering sold long ago, because the company has just decided to TVIX the muppets:

• GROUPON CUTS FORECAST - BBG
  
• GROUPON REFUND RESERVE ACCRUAL INCREASED - BBG

But most importantly:

• GROUPON SAYS MATERIAL WEAKNESS IN INTERNAL CONTROLS - BBG

We are fairly confident that the stock will continue imploding after hours until such time as confidence in the stock market returns.

And the numbers are out:

• RESEARCH IN MOTION 4Q REV. $4.19B, EST. $4.51B
• RESEARCH IN MOTION 4Q ADJ. EPS 80C, EST. 81C

No more guidance:

• RIMM WONT' GIVE QUANTIVE VIEWS DUE TO LONG TERM FOCUS

But here is what the market will focus on:

• RESEARCH IN MOTION REVIEWING STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITIES

I looks like a few home runs are in the making...

Following the May 2010 flash crash, the investing public hoped that as part of its "exhaustive report", the SEC would find and hold responsible the various components of a broken market structure, be it HFTs, ETFs, stubbing and sub-pennying algorithms, and all the other knowns and unknowns we have covered over the years. Instead, in what would prove to be a move of cataclysmic stupidity (if sadly understandable - the SEC, like everyone else "in charge" is used to dealing with a gullible and simplistic public, which has no access to the real data and analysis, and whose opinion could be easily manipulated, at least until now), the regulator blamed and scapegoated it all on a Waddell and Reed trade (we wonder just what the quid pro quo was to get the asset manager to roll over and take the blame despite protestations to the contrary, at least in the beginning). The result was that the same investing public realized that market structure is so corrupt, and so robotically mutated, there is no place for the small investor in this broken market. Last week's BATS IPO fiasco merely confirmed this. And as usual, BATS (whose chairman Ratterman has just been demoted even as he stays on as CEO) decided to take the "passive voice" approach and blame it all on a faceless, emotionless, motiveless "software glitch". Just like that perfectly innocuous BSOD we have all grown to love and expect any minute. Only it wasn't. To get to the bottom of what really happened, in a world in which the SEC is far more interested in finding the latest discount internet porn stream than actually protecting the small investor, we relied on our friends from Nanex, who have time and again proven to have a far better grasp of what it is that really happens in the market than virtually anyone else. And if Nanex' interpretation of events is correct (spoiler alert - it was not a "software glitch") it takes SkyNet wars from the silver screen and to a trading terminal near you. What happened is that a malicious, 100% intentional Nasdaq algorithm purposefully brought BATS stock to a price of 0.00 within 900 millisecond of the company's break for trading! This is open SkyNet warfare.

Reflections from the top. 

Spain, Europe, China - The Generational Opportunity to get hit head on by a Black Swan

There was a time when catching the silver "whack-a-mole" algo, or process, or intervention, or manipulation, or whatever one wants to call it, in action was a myth: an urban legend, perpetuated by silver conspiracy theorists. Until today that is. Courtesy of Nanex we now have direct evidence of just what the reflexive market (in which derivative products such as ETFs influence underlying assets) goes to town by taking silver to the woodshed at a whopping 75,000 times per second! From the broken market sleuths at Nanex:  "On March 20, 2012 at 13:22:33, the quote rate in the ETF symbol SLV sustained a rate exceeding 75,000/sec (75/ms) for 25 milliseconds. Nasdaq quotes lagged other exchanges by about 50 milliseconds. Nasdaq quotes even lagged their own trades -- a condition we have jokingly referred to as fantaseconds." Translation: so desperate was the desire to crush silver at precisely 13:22;33, that the Nasdaq order flow directive ended up moving faster than light. Frankly, we don't know about you, but when someone is willing to bend the laws of relativity, just to get a cheaper price in silver, to perpetuate a failing monetary system or for any other reason, we quietly step aside...

That Diamond Foods is a dead man walking has been known for a while. Today we merely got the latest confirmation, after the company announced that it has reached a forbearance deal with its lender through June 18, in exchange for suspending dividends (duh) as well as a one time 25 bps loan fee, and an interest increase by 75 bps until June 18. At that point the company will still have to find a replacement facility, or do another forebearance deal which extracts even more equity value and hands it on a silver platter to secured creditors... kinda like Greece. Curiously, moments before close the market reacted like a stung HFT algo (see chart below) to a headline from the WSJ that "Diamond Foods in Talks With PE for Minority Investment." Sure it is - the problem is that any minority investment at this point will likely come below market, as this is not an M&A deal but a vulture equity financing. In fact, we would not be surprised if the lenders are contemplated a debt for equity exchange. However, for it to make sense, the stock would have to be far lower. Anyway, the stock reopens at 5:15pm. Stay tuned.

There are those who, not illogically, thought that the second interest rates start creeping up, that there would be a rush of mortgage activity to lock in rates as low as possible before 30 year mortgages roll ever higher. Of course, for that plan to work, one Benjamin Shalom Bernanke would need to have broad credibility among the general population, as he would need to be perceived as one who would not rush to purchase bonds in the future, should rates jump far too high, in the process impairing banks and PDs which still hold massive amounts of paper. If, however, that plan were to not work, then the latest recent attempt to force a rotation out of stocks and into bonds would have abysmal consequences on housing, as the entire mortgage issuance machinery would grind to a halt. Alas, it appears the latter has happened. Minutes ago we got the latest MBA Mortgage Application data and it was ugly. The broad Mortgage Application index collapsed by 7.4% in the week ending March 16, when rates experienced the bulk of the move downward, which was the 6th consecutive week of declines, following last week's 2.4% drop. And while refis have been down for 5 weeks in a row, with the index slamming 9.3% lower as higher rates have now obviously killed any interest in mortgages, so have purchase applications. MBA Purchasing index was down 4.4%, breaking a trend of 3 weeks of gains. Some other hard statistics: the Average 30 year fixed rate soared to 4.19% from 4.06% last week, while the refi % of number of loans dropped to 73.4% - the lowest since July 2011.

All you need to read.

The market is ripping. That much is obvious. What some may have forgotten however, is that it ripped in the beginning of 2011... and in the beginning of 2010: in other words, what we are getting is not just deja vu (all on the back of massive central bank intervention time after time), but double deja vu. The end results, however, by year end in both those cases was less than spectacular. In fact, in an attempt to convince readers that this time it is different, Reuters came out yesterday with an article titled, you guessed it, "This Time It's Different" which contains the following verbiage: "bursts of optimism have sown false hope before... Today there is a cautious hope that perhaps this time it's different." (this article was penned by the inhouse spin master, Stella Dawson, who had a rather prominent appearance here.) So the trillions in excess electronic liquidity provided by everyone but the Fed (constrained in an election year) is different than the liquidity provided by the Fed? Got it. Of course, there are those who will bite, and buy the propaganda, and stocks. For everyone else, here is a rundown from David Rosenberg explaining why stocks continue to move near-vertically higher, and what the latent risks continue to be.