Whitney Tilson

The market crept up again today like Jessica Simpson's pants or like Pete Townshend at...

The theater of the macabre goes one further following the just released response by Whitney Tilson to this morning's attempted rebuke of the short Netflix thesis by Reed Hasting. StreetInsider cites Tilson, who told the breaking news site the following: ""I'm glad Reed Hastings took the time to reply to some of the issues we raised. He made a number of good points and helped us -- and other investors -- understand him and his company better. I think a friendly, respectful debate like this is healthy and wish there was more of it." We are now holding our breath until we get Reed's response to this follow up response, to his original response, over just how overvalued his company is. Ironically, we don't really see what the reason for this theatrical acrimony is: after all it is pretty obvious that both Hastings (and the firm's CFO prior to his surprising resignation recently) and Tilson are on the same side of the trade.

In what is rapidly becoming a mockery of the investing process, after Netflix recently advised shorts to cover during their investor call, the firm's desperation has hit a new all time low. Today NFLX CEO, Reed Hasting, has responded directly to ongoing attacks by Whitney Tilson that his company is due for a major correction, by posting in financial website Seeking Alpha. Hastings' stunning conclusion: " Whitney lays out a series of potential issues for us: Our CFO’s
recent resignation; threats to the First Sale doctrine for DVDs;
Internet bandwidth costs potentially increasing; declining FCF
conversion; market saturation; weak streaming content; paying more for
streaming content; and increased competition hurting margins. He only
has to be right on one or two of these issues in 2011 for him to make
money on his short of Netflix. Odds are he is wrong on all of them, in my view. Let’s take them one at a time." And while Tilson has indeed suffered major losses so far on this short, we are very confident that his perseverance will pay off. As we noted previously, the major concern facing Netflix is not so much margins (which is a major concern), but cash flow generation. As such, we continue to view the probability of a follow on offering by the company to be very high, as the firm already issued high yield bonds recently and has very little dry powder left under the "indebtedness incurrence" basket.  In the meantime, we can all enjoy the spectacle that is NFLX' defense of its ludicrous 100x+ fwd P/E position.

Oh shit, it is on again like white on rice, stink on shit, and Black on Scholes (and for you quants, just know that Brownian motion has more than one meaning), as a flurry of blue chip companies beat earnings guesses and pushed the market higher. With the 50 day moving average now rising above the 200 day moving average the S&P has hit the fabled Golden Cross (which is kind of like the Hindenburg Omen only less fiery, with fewer McClellan Oscillators, and the exact opposite), which means technicians are expecting to be showered with returns.

Our research on Interoil (IOC) leads us to believe there may be a lot of skeletons in its closet, making it a top choice for our next bearish position.

"Sometimes the cheapest situations are the ones that everyone agrees are cheap, but there's no catalyst. We think cheapness is its own catalyst and if you can be patient, sometimes for a year or two, you'll be rewarded. Our patience and the investor base we built that allows us to be patient is a big advantage."

Whitney Tilson was up 3.5% in July, surprisingly not beating the market's 7% rip, even with his well publicized BP position (cost basis of $29). Tilson's notable movers: "On the long side, winners of note included BP (up 33.2%), Goldman Sachs (14.9%), Resource America (13.0%), American Express (12.4%), AB InBev (10.5%), CIT (7.4%), and General Growth Properties (5.0%), slightly offset by Berkshire Hathaway (-2.5%). On the short side, we profited handsomely from VistaPrint (-30.4%) and Gentiva Health Services (-23.6%), but these gains were more than offset by losses on MBIA (up 54.7%) and InterOil (35.1%)." Additionally, Tilson shares an in depth thesis of his three favorite stocks: AB InBev, Microsoft and BP.

Investors are understandably scared of the sovereign debt crisis unfolding in Europe. Amid their angst, however, they are ignoring a more likely, and significantly larger, debt catastrophe that is about to hit the nation with the second-largest economy in the world — Japan. Two decades of stimulative, low-interest-rate fiscal policy have made Japan the most indebted nation in the developed world, and as new Prime Minister Naoto Kan recently said, in his first address to Parliament, that situation is not sustainable. Japan has little choice but to raise interest rates substantially, with dire consequences far beyond its shores.

BP has discovered the largest and most powerful well in history, and control of it may be outside existing technology. Less than 1% of the spilled oil is ending up on the beaches. Possibly 36 million barrels will end up in the sea, the same amount put there by German U-boats during WWII. The best historical analogy is not asbestos or tobacco, but Vioxx. Not for widows and orphans

Reuters is so not getting the administration's latest round of taxpayer bail out funding when mainstream media comes knocking on Obama's door looking for handouts. The media company has shockingly decided to release some of the truth about the biosystematic genocide currently happening in the Gulf: "As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday. Texas A&M University oceanography professor John Kessler, just back from a 10-day research expedition near the BP Plc oil spill in the gulf, says methane gas levels in some areas are "astonishingly high." Luckily, America is gradually realizing that the entire food chain in the southeast is about to be turned around on its head, leading to a massive and unprecedented ecological disaster, which will certainly wipe out thousands of species and result in not only a surge in unemployment (that's a given) but outright loss of life (at statistically significant levels), and the anger is mounting. Perhaps the one good thing to come out of the worst ecological disaster in world history will be the sudden, and jarring awakening from the generational slumber for most of America, and a long overdue overhaul of a broken political and economic system.

There are some, like Pimco and Whitney Tilson's T2, who enjoy talking their book, and demonstrating they just love to live dangerously by buying the stock of a company which has an Upside/Downside ratio of 1 (or 100% on both sides, with the government dead set on pushing the "equation" solidly to the D side). Then, there are those, who would rather go to Vegas, breathe in deeply some beta radiation courtesy of the Us DoD and DoE, play some serious blackjack, get the presidential suite and all the Grey Goose comped, and have the very same wining odds as a BP investment, even as the house is gamed to win in the long run (thank you HFT).For those in the first camp, below, courtesy of My Investing Notebook, is Whitney Tilson's case on why BP's stock price belongs tens of dollars higher. For the sake of Blackrock and every pensioner in the UK, we hope Tilson is correct. For now, he has a ways to get above hist cost basis.

It's time for the annual trip to Omaha.

Whitney Tilson's T2 rose 4.6% in March, and 10.1% in Q1, primarily due to its GGP holdings. Also, Iridium appears to still be in business and generating returns for T2. Other longs include such non-blue chips as Borders, Winn-Dixie, Resource America and Yahoo. The fund's short book seems to not have done so well, with key names Lululemon, DineEquity and MBIA surging during the period. The one bright spot on the short side was Palm.

Whitney Tilson is still extremely bullish on GGP. Whether he is right, or if the stock was simply floating, suspended by a rising beta tide since the beginning of the rally, will soon be determined. Even sooner if the current incipient correction accelerates. And soonest if it turns out Almunia was just buying banks time to offload their GGB holdings and Greece defaults over the next several weeks.

So, it looks like Lloyds and RBS are going to get broken up into smaller, more manageable pieces by the Brits. I think it is clear that something similar is needed in the US to dismantle the banking oligarchy. Could it happen here? Well, maybe the follow the leader dynamic that occurred during the misguided attempt to ban short sales will play out in this case as well.