Jim Cramer

26-year-old Hu Bin is China's most popular online market commentator - just four years after starting his blog. As Bloomberg BusinessWeek notes, his success started when Premier Wen Jiabao announced a 4 trillion renminbi rescue plan and as 'Commander in Chief of the Stock Market Army' Hu says "I knew I just needed to be clever and use this chance of high liquidity in the market to make myself famous." The brash, eccentric, and outspoken blogger is among the Top 10 most influential people on the Chinese stock market (though under his alias 'Yerongtian' - though preferring the nickname 'Batman') and notes that "any eccentric behavior would attract people's attention. If you understood this vital point, you could control  people's minds." Hu says he is not a financial rabble-rouser adding that "the stock market in the US is managed by regulations; the Chinese market is managed by humans. The 72 million 'retail' Chinese investors aren't as mature as American investors, and I write to meet their immediate needs." While recognizing the irresistible pull of stocks, he understands he's giving advice to people he knows probably shouldn’t be in the market but are going to invest anyway.  What's Chinese for BooYaa?

With every man, woman, and child now firmly aboard the 'RIMM is back' bandwagon, the squeeze in after-hours trading appears to have had a 30-minute half-life. It seems the Blackberry-maker just can't get a break. Two words "iconic" and "Kodak" come to mind... RIMM is now -9% on the day, after being up 4% at the day-session close and up over 13% on earnings news... oops. Paging Eric Jackson? RIMM -20% from after-hours highs

Some have argued that a fiscal-cliff-impacted US economy would enter a recession as hard as Manny Pacquiao hit the canvas on Saturday night but for most of the nation it seems the fiscal cliff is of secondary importance... Will Pacquiao-Marquez 5 coincide with Debt-Ceiling II?

While "Fiscal Cliff" may be having its 15-minutes of fame - a la "Honey Boo Boo" or "Sneezing Panda" - there is one thing that has consistently been more and more searched in the last eight years. According to Google Trends, internet users are skipping just plain old simple "ammo" as a search query, and in a tried and true American tradition, confirm that size matters. The size of the ammo order that is, as can be confirmed by the following chart showing queries for "bulk ammo". What goes without saying, are the wavelike periodicities of the quantized jumps higher in popularity at select times over the past decade: they just happen to aggregate around a very specific event taking place each November every 4 years. At this rate by November 2016 we are going to need a bulkier chart...

Earlier we noted the dismal volume in the markets today, it turns out we under-estimated just how dismal... Today was the lowest Monday-after-Thanksgiving Day NYSE volume since 1996! We suspect you will not hear that 'fact' on your favorite business media channel when they crow of the 'well off the lows' performance today...

Judging from the market's reaction (which after all is the only thing that counts apparently), we have little to fear but fear itself - especially when it comes to real fundamental earnings. However, for those with depth perception issues (two data points, a trend do make), color blindness (red is always green as it's 'off-the-lows'), and ADHD (10-second soundbites only), the following chart should help clarify just how bad Q3 revenues were - and how weak the recent trend is (hint - from the upper left to the lower right is not good).

You've probably noticed the cookie-cutter format of most financial media "news": a few key "buzz words" (fiscal cliff, Bush tax cuts, etc.) are inserted into conventional contexts, and this is passed off as either "reporting" or "commentary" depending on the number of pundits sourced. Correspondent Frank M. kindly passed along a template that is "officially deny its existence" secret within the mainstream media. With this template, you could launch your own financial media channel, ready to compete with the big boys. Heck, you could hire some cheap overseas labor to make a few Skype calls to "the usual suspects," for-hire academics, hedge fund gurus, etc. and actually attribute the fluff to a real person.

Whether greed-prone, fear-stricken, or full-prepper; the post-election performance of both gun-and-ammo 'makers' and gun-and-ammo 'searches' on-line has been remarkable...

Sometimes, it just pays to keep it simple stupid. At some point, the dismal economic reality of our post-credit-creation-miracle boom world will reassert itself in asset prices. The catalyst may not be obvious (like a close-election reminding a nation of sheep just how divided we are as a people and implicitly as a political class - and what that means for our future fiscal probity); but it is coming. 'Cycles' cycle; the Fed has fired its bazooka; and OMT omnipotence is in doubt;and the only way we get 'moar money' from our central planners is if their hand is forced by a reversion to reality...

Earlier we asked a simple question:

What time is the all time highest UMich Consumer Sentiment out?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 9, 2012

the answer is 9:55... and while not an all time high, LOLfidence, pardon, CONfidence just printed the highest number since July 2007!

Predictions regarding the election outcome are all over the place. Dennis Gartman for instance thinks that 'Romney will win quite handily'. While this opinion may be largely informed by wishful thinking in this case, there are two interesting points made by Gartman. One concerns poll errors, and the other the Bradley (or Wilder) effect (or 'political correctness effect' - i.e., it is not motivated by racism, but by the fear of people that they might be seen as racist). Jim Cramer is taking the exact opposite view from Gartman's, expecting a 'landslide' victory for Obama. Of course Cramer wouldn't be Cramer if his forecast didn't stand out for being a bit extreme. The Princeton election consortium's latest update of the meta-analysis of the electoral vote count on the eve of the election continues to predict an Obama victory as well, but clearly the race is getting tighter. However, across the pond, it is clear that the Europeans see the election (and indeed any election it seems) very differently, highlighting their ignorance of the difference between 'total capitalism' and 'crony capitalism'.

Will the president preannounce the epic surge that Sandy will bring to Q4 GDP as America fails upward to achieve the Keynesian utopia through an infinity of broken windows - a hurricane that CNBC's Jim Cramer called a "GDP event", or merely an opportunity to take more shots... Find out below.

It's AAPL? It's GDP? It's Europe? It's the fiscal cliff? The real answer to why the market/AAPL is down today is clearly laid out in the table below. A stunning 30 of the 40 Fed employees on Bloomberg (that's 75% for the Keynesians) is red - or out of the office today. The PPT is OOTO! Good to know all that taxpayer money covering these terminals is going to good use! Also keep an eye on Kevin Henry's dot turning yellow from green and vice versa. The NY Fed trader's presence, or absence, at his desk may be the only risk on/risk off signal left in today's market.

The last few years have been a wild ride in the world's equity markets. None wilder than the US equity markets. The only fly in the ointment is that we've seen this kind of 'wild ride' before, the kind of unbridled nothing-can-stop-us-now, its-all-priced-in, Central-Bank-sponsored rallies that have been the bread-and-butter of every BTFD'er since March 2009. Presented with little comment - this time it's different, we really hope...

With over a third of the S&P 500's market cap having reported, results have been mixed. Aggregate earnings are tracking ahead of expectations but this miracle is driven almost entirely by financials (which account for 85% of the beat) as lower expenses and higher reserve bleeds offset contracting NIMs (combined with a lack of MtM) to enable a total manufacturing of what S&P 500 EPS is. As Morgan Stanley's Adam Parker notes, the quality of the beats has been low, with companies benefiting from a mix of lower operating costs and lower taxes. Revenues are missing estimates (hurt by a stronger USD and macro weakness) and Tech has been particularly weak. More importantly, for all the hope-driven, recovery-is-around-the-corner, 'fiscal-cliff'-won't-happen believers, the majority of forward guidance has been negative resulting in the highest negative-to-positive ratio since 1Q07 but this is not priced in as top-down 4Q12 estimates have hardly budged.