6/18/10 Midday Report: Gold hits new highs, silver plans an intervention

It's quadruple witching Friday today in the market which is unfortunately just the day where stock index futures, stock index options, stock options, and single stock futures all expire and not the day where the market finally gets a 5-some with Elizabeth Montgomery, Barbara Eden, Melissa Joan Hart, and Omarrosa.  While this is usually a volatile day, the market has been quieter than the Clinton's bedroom as there has been little macro or company news released today.  That said, owners of gold are being showered with rewards as gold has reached a record high today thanks to investors betting against the current fiat system remaining viable.  While it's likely we'll hit a deflationary period before inflation takes off like Shawn Kemp from a delivery room, holding gold as part of your portfolio right now as a hedge against volatility and the potential crash of the Euro makes more sense than pairing Suaterenes with a nice foie gras.  In other US news, Tim Geithner is apparently getting new and more power which he has easily earned given how he has revived this economy from dead to about to die again and helped to bail out the firms who caused this mess.  Geithner is set to lead a new council run by the Treasury Department to identify companies that might be shut down because they pose a risk to the financial system.  So does that mean the government is going to shut down the SEC, FCIC, FINRA, FDIC, and NAMBLA?  Don't they all do the same fucking thing?  Hey, I know how to solve a problem, let's just create other fucking groups to do the same thing that current groups do but hope they do it better.  Unbelievable.  Money McBags just wants to know when more bureaucracy has ever fixed anything other than creating meaningless jobs.  Somewhere Josef K. is scratching his head.

Internationally, the Eurozone added Estonia as the lastest member in their global ponzi scheme.  Estonia now has to pay $1B to Greece, and then Greece will pay 80% of that up to Spain, who will then pay 80% of that up to Germany.  Funding problems solved.  While it is certainly odd timing for a country to be joining the eurozone, Estonia said they had no choice after the University of Texas decided to stay in the Big 12 and and Utah beat them out for the last spot in the Pac 10.  “It’s a great day for Estonia,” remarked Estonian prime minister Andrus Ansip, who was perhaps (an)sipping on a little too much Saku Originaal as getting in to the Eurozone right now is about as desirable as joining a tv show co-starring Ted McGinley or being drafted by the Washington Generals.  Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar with Estonia, here are some quick facts:  They were 4th out of 173 countries in the Worldwide Press Freedom Index narrowly being edged out by Canada and their NSFW Naked News, they've previously been occupied by more countries than Zsa Zsa Gabor's vagina, and the person they most admire is Yosemite Sam.  They've been independent since 1991 and are finally looking to settle down after 20 years of hard drinking and nordic flirtations in order to raise their favorite offspring Tiiu Kuik in a stronger family environment.  So welcome to the Euro Estonia, just don't burn all those Kroons quite yet.  In other international news, the IMF backed Spain's austerity measures after downing one sangria too many and learning about imaginary numbers.

In stock news, C is planning on raising $3B because they haven't lost enough investor capital already.  Just remember, this bank is so poorly run and has such bad judgment that they fired someone for being too hot, and she's not even really that hot, I mean we're not talking about Sara Carbonero for fucksake.  And the best part about this is that they are raising money for their private equity and hedge fund groups right before Paul Volcker slaps his rule on the table and bans banks from owning those type of funds.  Wow.  Good for the funds but that makes about as much sense for C as it did for Saddam Hussein to build a new palace in Baghdad in March of 2003 or Simona Halep to go bra shopping right before the summer of 2009.  Money McBags is sure C's CEO Vikram Pandit will retain some type of personal interest in these funds when the Volcker Rule takes effect so I guess it makes sense for him but for C shareholders it seems like a whole lot of wasted time and energy (though if you're a C shareholder, you have bigger problems to worry about than the company raising money for funds they are going to have to give up soon).  In other news, CVS and WAG decided to end their snit over prescription drug benefit reimbursement and just go back to screwing Medicare and the American health care system together.  Finally Moody's lowered their ratings of BP by 3 notches from the unintelligible Aa2 to the just as unintelligible A2 (or maybe it was the other way around, who the fuck knows).  It's nice to see that weeks in to one of the biggest environmental disasters in history, Moody's is still on the ball.  Good job guys, Money McBags eagerly awaits your downgrade of daguerreotype companies within the next 6 months.  Though to be honest, any investor who needs Moody's to tell them BP is more fucked than a cupcake in Kirstie Alley's house probably shouldn't be investing.

In small cap news CRUS continues to rocket up.  Money McBags believes $24 (20x his $1.20 estimates) is a plenty fair price but at $20 he'd start to think about trimming to take some of the hella sweet profits you've made off the table (and rememeber Money McBags first brought CRUS to your attention when they were trading under $8 and he told you he bought them shortly thereafter.  The fact that he dumped them after the "Flash crash" for liquidity reasons doesn't change his valuation, it only makes him angrier that he believes the market structure is so broken that fundamentals may not matter).  And if any of you are interested in a high flying small volatile momentum name, check out SPRT.  Money McBags will try to break them down next week but they are basically outsourced and remote computer repair.  It's like Geek Squad only you don't have to have a fat smelly skeevy fuck show up at your house and stink the place up while he wipes all of the porn off your computer to clean up whatever virus you downloaded while searching for that Miley Cyrus upskirt pic (and Money McBags will not be linking to the pic since he believes in the legal system).  It's certainly an interesting and potential low cost business model and the company is currently scaling up their technicians faster than a young hollywood starlet scales up her ambitions.  It is doubtful that in this market Money McBags would ever own this stock because a lot has to go right for it to be valued even near what it is trading today, but it has a nice story has some real opportunity, and more than anything it has strong momentum and a rapidly accelerating business.  If you have money you don't care about, send it to Money McBags for a night out at Rick's, otherwise, do some research here as this might be a good trade.