Twitter

"I haven't got a computer, but I was told about Facebook and Twitter and am trying to make friends in the real world applying the same principles..."

Apple is now down 15% from record highs as "no brainer" investors begin to question their faith in its China prospects. This is the biggest drop since January 2013 and overall AAPL is now almost unchanged on the year...AAPL has lost $27bn market cap today.. a TWTR or a LNKD

After a lukewarm start by the Chinese "market", which had dropped for the past 6 out of 7 days despite ever escalating measures by Beijing to manipulate stocks higher, finally the Shanghai Composite reacted favorably to Chinese micromanagement of stock prices and closed 3.7% higher as Chinese regulators stepped up their latest measures by adjusting rules on short-selling in order to reduce trading frequency and price volatility, resulting in several large brokerages suspending short sell operations. At this pace only buy orders will soon be legal which just may send the farce of what was once a "market" limit up.

The headlines are dramatic, ugly and depressing to anyone who holds gold right now. Broad market sentiment has shifted from disdain and dismissive to highly negative. Hedge funds are shorting gold aggressively, hedge funds that own gold are being "outed". The market pundits are are sticking the proverbial knife in and twisting it with glee. 

The cracks in the facade are starting to show... as we warned yesterday, it is different this time...

If China had hoped it would root out intervention by eliminating Citadel's rigging algos, and unleash a buying spree it was wrong: the Shanghai Composite opened negative, and never managed to cross into the green, despite the usual last hour push higher, ending down -1.1% and down for 6 of the past 7 days. The real action, however, was not in Asia but in Europe, and specifically Greece, where the stock market finally reopened after a 1+ month "capital control" hiatus. Despite the attempt to micro manage the reopening, the result was not pretty, with stocks crashing 23% at the open and staging barely a rebound trading -17% as of this moment, even as banks promptly traded down to the -30% limit as the realization that an equity-eviscerating recapitalization (or bail-in) is now inevitable.

The world of everything Social has been the undisputed benefactor of all this “free money.” After all, wasn’t the term “Unicorn” applied and accepted with all its connotations as being a mythical creature that lived and breathed in the land of make-believe? It is incontrovertible that if not for the “free money” provided by QE, many, if not most of what currently falls under the social media umbrella would not only never had come into existence (let alone with Billion dollar price tags), but the perceived “hands off – unquestioning” attitude by Wall Street itself wound not be allowed. This in my opinion is an absolute wanton abandonment of business fundamentals and principles. However, it seems there is a change of mood (or realization the jig is truly up) on Wall Street.

The IMF made some frowing decisions...

Some were confused if the Mt. Gox founder, Mark Karpeles, was going to get away with nothing more than an excuse, even if - as many speculated - he had personally fabricated exchange data entries and embezzled millions of dollars for his own account. Earlier today we got the answer when nearly 18 months after his infamous apology, Mark Karpeles was arrested in Tokyo. FT reports that Japanese police have arrested Mark Karpelès, the head of the bankrupt Japan-based bitcoin exchange Mt Gox. The arrest charge is that he made an illegal entry to the system in February 2013 and increased the balance of his account by $1 million.

We didn't think much yesterday morning when we read reports that a 2010 Embraer Phenom 300 private jet, with a Saudi Registration HZ-IBN, crashed at a car auction site in Hampshire. Just like one year ago, the reason for the importance of the crash was made apparent only hours later.  Shortly after the crash, reports in UK media outlets, including the Daily Mail and Mirror, alleged that the $11 million jet was owned by Jeddah-based Salem Aviation, a company named after Osama bin Laden’s elder cousin, who himself was an amateur pilot and died in a plane crash. Among the other casualties: Osama bin Laden's sister and stepmother.

In an interview on Bloomberg’s “First Up” show, Treasurer for the Perth Mint, Nigel Moffatt, said “Our biggest restriction is the amount of unrefined gold we’re getting in from producers”, adding, “everything we get in is going straight out the door as soon as we refine it.”

We’re always interested in alternative economic frameworks that can help address the sizable gaps left open by classical approaches. Behavioral economics can fill part of that void, of course, as it describes some basic shortfalls in the assumption that we’re all superhuman welfare maximizing individuals. One step beyond that is evolutionary economics, which borrows from biology rather than psychology to form models about economic behavior.

Shortly after we reported the latest market-rigging scandal, in which ITG was busted for frontrunning sellside clients in its dark pool in what has been since dubbed a "trading experiment" (because it sounds better than criminal conspiracy to defraud clients), and which will cost the company a record for a private Wall Street firm $22 million settlement, we had one question for AQR's Cliff Asness yesterday morning: "Hi @Cimmerian999, is Hitesh Mittal the AQR employee who was formerly at ITG and is part of the SEC settlement?"   We got no answer from the AQR head, but luckily Bloomberg noticed, and as it turns out the answer to our question was a resounding yes.

As Sean Davis of the Federalist reports, Planned Parenthood claims on several of its websites that the organization’s web operations have been attacked by "extremists"  but this so-called hacking has all the hallmarks of an orchestrated public relations stunt. A cursory check of the website moments ago shows it stating that "Our normal site is currently undergoing maintenance." What makes this hack unique, however, is that "numerous people on Twitter pointed to evidence suggesting that this so-called hack wasn’t a hack at all."