My new podcast episode is out

If I could short Bill Ackman and his hedge fund right now, I would do it!

Bill Ackman just bought a 10% stake in Chipotle, a company with a 65 p/e that sells Mexican food. Mark my words, you can add that to his list of disastrous plunges over the last ten years. Herbalife, Valeant and “macro” plays that look they came right out of a Peter Schiff playbook.

If I could short Bill Ackman and his hedge fund I would do it right now. He doesn’t have much longer as a hedge fund manager, that’s my prediction. His Investments have been nothing less than a mind-blowing display of incompetence.  I cannot understand how people give this guy money, but then again, I say that about most of the big name hedge fund managers and it’s true.

Ackman is not a wealth creator; he’s a wealth destroyer, for his investors and for the businesses he invests in. Maybe he, personally, is wealthy, but like most hedge fund guys it’s because of the outrageous fees that stupid people pay him to lose their money.

I remember back in 2007 during the financial crash when everyone was talking about the TARP program and the bank bailouts. Ackman was on CNBC (of course, more idiots) proposing some cockamamie scheme of how the government could issue deeply discounted zero-coupon bonds to “raise the money” to help bail out the banks. He was completely clueless to the fact that the United States government has the capacity to credit dollars in an infinite amount to anybody's bank account if necessary. Where do they get the trillions to fight war? Sell zero coupon bonds?

Wtth the Herbalife deal there was that priceless on-air exchange between Carl Icahn and Ackman where Icahn, in very direct language, told Ackman that he used to beat up kids like him back when he was groing up in a tough section of Queens. It was hilarious. The CNBC anchor at the time had a look on his face, like, “this is going down as one of the most classic moments of television.” It was.

Turned out that Icahn took the occasion to beat up Ackman, again, at least financially. He bought a huge position in Herbalife right after that, probably just to screw with lil’ Billy from the playground, and made out like a bandit when the stock soared shortly afterward.

Now, here’s Ackman announcing his big Chipotle investment. How  do you buy a $440 stock that has a 65 p/e? Don’t get me wrong, I'm not necessarily against buying stocks with a high p/e ratios even though I don’t do that personally. Amazon is a perfect example. You could have bought that stock at 220 in 2012, with a P/E ratio almost as high. It seemed expensive then, but the stock is at 785 now. However, Amazon is a rare example of the ultimate disrupter. It is literally destroying brick and mortar retail. Stocks like that only come along every once in a while.

On the other hand what’s Chipotle’s business model? It sells burritos and tacos. I like Mexican food as much as the next guy but selling tacos isn’t a business model that' about to change the world. Even if Chipotle doubled its earnings it would still have a p/e over 30, which is way above the valuation of the sector that it is in. And if it tripled its earnings--which is simply not going to happen--then it would be about equal to its sector’s valuation. Furthermore, in both cases that would mean the stock could not move above its current level, just the earnings would have to rise. How likely is that?

So what the hell is Ackman doing? Same as he's always done, getting ready to lose money.

I remember some time ago Ackman said that he wanted to be like Warren Buffet. That is, run a giant, public company that’s really just a hedge fund. Forget it. Warren Buffett is one of a kind. For a really, really, big investor, he pretty much gets it. He gets the macro. He gets that it’s not about buying some dicey, pie-in-the-sky highly overvalued turnaround situation or, engaging in gimmicky tactics like shorting a stock then getting your friends in the media and at the SEC to write smear articles and launch investigations so that you can buy your shorts in at a lower price.

Buffett buys stocks like Coca-Cola and General Motors and Microsoft. Boring stuff, but established, world class businesses. Then, he waits. He waits until stupid, panicky and irrational investors dump them wholesale for no reason. (Maybe because Peter Schiff or some other idiot says the Dow is going to under 1000.) 

Actually, I WISH that Ackman could be like Buffett and go public. Then it would be easy to short his hedge fund. And I would do it all day long. I would mortgage everything to do it because it’s easy money. I’d clean up. When there are guys out there like Ackman or Schiff or Gross or Kyle Bass, you don’t need MMT,  you don’t need market knowledge, you don’t need anything except the understanding that a fool and his money will soon be parted.

I have yet to see a hedge fund operator who knows anything about economics or the monetary system

This should be no surprise. I have been documenting how clueless these guys are for a long time here on this blog.

Whether it's Kyle Bass or David Einhorn or Bill Ackman or John Paulson or even Bill Gross or any of them, they don't know what the fuck they are talking about.

They got everything wrong: monetary operations, inflation, the dollar, interest rates, commodities, "stimulus," etc.

On the other hand, I (we) got everything right because of our understanding of flows and MMT.

(Which begs the question: why am I not managing $15 billion? Go ahead and ask, it's a good question. Probably because I suck at marketing myself.)

Anyway, you can do better than them. Start by signing up for a 30-day free trial to my weekly report, MMT Trader. Take the money from these loser hedgies.

Valeant...another disaster for Bill Ackman. What's with this guy? What's with all these guys?

Valeant shares are getting pummeled today. Hedge fund guy, Bill Ackman, was long a boatload. He's getting creamed.

That comes after his disaster with shorting Herbalife. That was a disaster even despite teh fact that he tried to get the government to intervene on his behalf and start an investigation into the company. (Sleaze.)

Then we find out he recently shorted the Chinese yuan because he thought there was going to be a "debt crisis" in China. Like, China would run out of yuan. The other idiot that did that was Kyle Bass, who keeps losing money in one fictitious debt crisis after another. (Remember the Japan debt crisis he predicted?)

What's wrong with these guys? Ackman, Bass, Einhorn, Gross...they all suck. They all do the same, wrong thing. They're all fucking clueless.

I should be managing billions. Maybe I suck at marketing. Yeah, I do.

Does billionaire hedge fund guy, Bill Ackman, ever make any money? Legitimately?

What's with Bill Ackman, I mean, does he make money?

"Ackman’s hedge fund may have lost over $160 million on Valeant’s stock on Thursday, and about $580 million since March 31"

The only thing I ever see coming from this guy are losses and that's even with the help of the media that he enlists to spread lies about companies he has positions in or, getting regulators to launch investigations where they're not warranted.

For the life of me I cannot figure out these hedge fund guys. They seem really clueless or, only capable of cheating or defrauding. It seems like Ackman really doesn't know what he is doing, but he certainly goes around talking like he's a VSP (very smart person).

Go figure.

Robin Hood gala shatters record for money raising and hypocrisy

On Tuesday night the Robin Hood Foundation had its annual gala and raised a record breaking $101 million in one night, shattering every record by any fund raising event ever.

It also shattered something else: the record for most monumental hypocrisy of all time.

That's because, while all these super rich hedge funders, celebrities and "0.1 percenters" basked in their self-importance and patted each other on the back for their obscenely phony show of "help" to the poor, the vast majority of these folks support political candidates and causes that have removed tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of government support for the truly needy. So their $100 million was really only "paying the tab" for their over the top display of self adulation.

If you think about the absurdity of this: a hedge fund guy (Paul Tudor Jones), worth $4 billion, who makes his money; a) by speculating--often driving up the price of food and fuel, which only adds to poverty and; b) charging hefty fees on the money he manages, which is largely in retirement funds of working people, he is lauded to the point of being considered, like, the new Mother Fucking Theresa.

Or consider, Bill Ackman, whose "job" it is to destroy companies and jobs (Herbalife) with malicious short selling raids designed to take a business down, yet he is also lauded as some benevolent prince?

And all their speculator hedge fund friends who do the same?

WTF??

Like a good friend of mine said, "Nobody takes time to connect the dots."

Whiny hedge fund idiot, Bill Ackman, buys the government's help to bail him out of his Herbalife short

Bill Ackman, the whining, crybaby hedge fund manager who has been disastrously selling short shares of Herbalife for two years, bleeding money in the process, has finally found someone to help his losing cause: the U.S. government.

That's right, he basically paid off the government to launch an inquiry into whether or not Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. The Federal Trade Commission has just launched an investigation on the behest of a group funded by Ackman.

We have all kinds of problems here in the U.S. folks: unemployment, income inequality, homelessness, maimed veterans, an education system that sucks, rotting infrastructure, monopolistic companies, plus much more. But no...the government feels it's more important to  get involved to protect the short position of one fucking idiot hedge fund manager.

The U.S. has become so corrupt it's almost impossible to describe at this point. Corrupt and rogue. A sham government and a nation that is rewriting the book when it comes to hypocrisy. (Sec of State Kerry: "You can't just invade a country on false pretense." LOL!!!!)

Remember that brilliant TV exchange between Carl Icahn and Ackman on CNBC a couple of years ago? It was all about Herbalife back then as well. I love the part where Icahn said that he used to beat up whiny little kids like Ackman in the schoolyard when he was growing up in Queens. I don't know about you, but I would pay handsomely to see him do it again. 

The existence of all these hedge funds is a symptom of a sick nation, a sick society and totally corrupt government. It is a glaring sign that we have our priorities soooo out of whack that it is not even funny. 

Guys like Ackman are parasites of the worst kind. This guy can't trade to save his life. He's a fucking sorry investor if you ask me. He also got his ass burned on JC Penney and I think he bought gold on the whole, "Fed is printing money," false inflation meme, just like all the other idiots. In short, what the fuck is he doing managing any money in the first place? And who invested with this guy? Whoever it was I'd like to see them go up in smoke, too.

Sorry for the editorializing here, but I guess you can tell I'm mad as hell.

The "Japan is going to have a debt crisis" man, Kyle Bass, now taking a position in JC Penney

Bill Ackman is out, after his disastrous foray into JC Penney (and before that, Herbalife) where he took major losses and contributed nothing of value or fresh perspective to the embattled retailer.

So now a new group of clueless hedge fund morons comes in, this time headed by none other than "Japan is going to experience a debt collapse," Kyle Bass. Bass has been putting on quite the dummy show in the past ten months telling everyone who would listen (mostly CNBC) that Japan won't be able to find enough "external funding" to pay its debts (which are in yen and which, last time I checked, are created solely by the Japanese government).

I guess Bass has now decided to focus his Einstein-like intellect on the retail sector and, seriously, that ought to be fun to watch.

I'm wondering if Bass might decide to take some cues from a fellow "genius" hedge funder, Eddie Lampert, you know, the Libertarian, Ayn Rand espousing, CEO of Sears Holdings (Sears, K-Mart), the American retailing icon that he has been phenomenally successful in destroying?

Line 'em up, folks. Whether we're talking about Bass or Lampert or Ackman or Paulson or Cohen or even Jamie Dimon and Goldman, this is what American capitalism has devolved into. A bunch of privileged, whiny, egotistical, arrogant, sociopathic jerks playing casino games with vast amounts of chips who leave a path of destruction in their wake everyhwhere they go that the rest of America has to swim through.