NASDAQ

With default risk soaring, and Ackman's dreams dissolving, Valeant Pharma is crashing again today (halted three times and down over 28%) following a report by Citron Research that claims to have a "smoking gun" on the company's activities, claiming Valeant is using pharmacies related to Philidor to store inventory and record the transactions as sales.

26 years ago, today was envisioned as day when cars flew, holographic movies were box office hits, hoverboards roamed, and people were fired by fax. None of the happened. Instead the only "back to the future" moment this morning is a deja vu one we have seen every day for the past 7 years: bad economic news leading to surging stocks.

Stocks of “vice” industries like alcohol and tobacco are showing leadership – that hasn’t always been good news for the market.

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Capitalism isn’t – wasn’t – the problem. The culprit instead was unsound finance and deeply flawed monetary management. In short, Capitalism cannot function effectively within a backdrop of unfettered cheap finance. Things appear miraculous during the boom, and then the bust discombobulates. Contemporary central bank rate administration essentially abandoned the self-adjusting and regulating market system for determining the price of finance – so fundamental to Capitalism.

The ability of the Nasdaq 100 to overcome nearby resistance would be one of the first price-based signs that the current stock rally may be more than just a mean-reversion bounce.

In the absence of any key economic developments in the Asian trading session, Asian stocks traded mostly under the influence of the late, pre-opex US ramp momentum courtesy of another day of ugly economic data in the US (bad econ news is good news for liquidity addicts), closing solidly in the green across the board, led by China (+1.6%) and Japan (+1.1%) thanks in no small part to the latest tumble in the Yen carry trade, which mirrored a bout of USD overnight weakness. And since a major part of the risk on move yesterday was due to Ewald Nowotny's comments welcoming more QE, news from Eurostat that Eurozone CPI in September dropped -0.1% confirming Europe's deflation continues, should only be greeted with even more buying as it suggests further easing by the ECB is inevitable.

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We were curious to observe what the traditionally far more rational, and skeptical, bearish community had to say about the real "quality" of the worst stocks on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq in those two brief weeks when things seemed to be getting back to normal: the stocks which if and when the Fed does lose control, would be the first to "go." Here is the answer.

Some things you CAN see coming, in life and certainly in finance. Quite a few things, actually. Once you understand we’re on a long term downward path, also both in life and in finance, and you’re not exclusively looking at short term gains, it all sort of falls into place. Of course, the entire global economy has been hanging together with strands of duct tape for decades now, but hey, it looks good as long as you don’t take a peek behind the facade, right?