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Even a few of our detractors have now come around
Everything is going down: shares, precious metals, bonds – it is all one way traffic south. The Nasdaq is now officially in a bear market, and has seen all of last year’s gains wiped out. The Dow is down from almost 37,000 at the turn of the year to 32,977 and all the US indexes slumped into yeserday’s close. But Bonds are also falling, and Gold had a poor week too – perhaps no surprise, given the general sell-off.
That was quite a week – having started in risk-on mode, all the major indices were slapped down on Friday, US treasuries fell away yet again and gold and silver slumped as the week drew to a close. Gold ended the week at $1,932, down from $1,974 a week ago, having bounced off resistance at $2,000. Meanwhile the Dow closed down 2.8% on Friday, alongside a 2.6% drop on the Nasdaq and a 1.4% fall from the FTSE100. The 10-year US Treasuries closed the week on a yield of 2.9% whilst 2-year hit 2.67%. The reason for the end-of-week squall was the Fed.
You can never keep a good man down. And, as for an absolute rotter like David Williams - who pumped satellite firm, Avanti Communications (AVN), before selling millions of pounds worth of shares, paid himself regular seven-figure stipends and then ran the company into the ground - it seems as if lightning will strike twice. We defied the notoriously litigious bombastic prick, and highlighted numerous Avanti concerns on this website, as you can see HERE.
Gold ended last week at $1836, up nicely from the prior week’s close at $1818 and, perhaps importantly, just above resistance at $1830-1835. Silver also did well, closing at $24.32 – close to a two month high. Meanwhile, for stockmarket bears, markets were selling off. The only ingredient now needed for Jordan Roy-Byrne’s (ahem….) golden scenario now is a Fed rate hike.
No doubt this will be celebrated by many a moron as well as many a fraudster. Gabriel’s latest dossier is on Cassava (SAVA) on Nasdaq. It is compelling yet he has today been flamed by the Reddit crowd and Cassava shares are roofing it. What does this all mean? Purplebricks (PURP) shows why bears are forces for good. I discuss it. Then Acceler8 (AC8), Parsley Box (MEAL) and Metro Bank (MTRO).
Hello, Share Placers. This old punter is constantly searching out new medical pioneers to have a crack at. If things work out, you have the profits and the added bonus of helping to move medical technology further forward. But the risks are more than normal because new treatments and cures have to be carefully researched and then licensed. And quite a few horses never leave the stalls.
It was announced on Friday afternoon by Schroder UK Public Private Trust (SUPP), the former Neil Woodford Patient Capital Trust (WPCT), that the IPO of Immunocore on Nasdaq had gone ahead. We were offered some tasty numbers, but are they really true?
At the weekend, ShareProphets’ favourite technical analyst seemed at his bearish worst, warning that the correction hasn’t played out yet, that gold could drop to the low $1800s and you should keep your powder dry. Of course, in the longer term, Jordan Roy-Byrne of TheDailyGold.com is a major gold bull so he sees a pull-back as an opportunity. On the other hand, I have been suggesting selective accumulation as and when the opportunity presents itself. And yesterday, almost as soon as Roy-Byrne’s thoughts were out, the gold price went into a tail-spin – he is infuriating!…
Phew – that was quite a week! Having posted yet another all-time high on Wednesday, the Nasdaq went into a mini-meltdown and dragged the DOW and the S&P with it, albeit to a much lesser extent. Even Bitcoin felt the wobbles as it closed the week at a shade over $10,000 having notched up almost $12,000 during the week. But as I sit here on the veranda of my log-cabin gazing out into the woods (where my secret stash of Gold is buried) it was a week of relative peace: it went up to just shy of $2,000 per oz and closed the week at $1935. Crisis? What crisis?
Last week I warned that markets were ripe for a big tumble in the face of, quoting Alan Greenspan (former head of the US Federal Reserve), irrational exuberance and that according to our favourite technical analyst Jordan Roy-Byrne of TheDailyGold.com gold and gold stocks were likely to offer a great buying opportunity. Well, here we are a week later and markets are down but there is a long way to go, and gold hasn’t gone anywhere……except the mining stocks have, and look set for a rebound.
Veteran analyst Michael Oliver started his career back in the mid-70s when gold was re-legalized. Instead of focusing on price, he looks at long-term trends, which is important because price being based in fiat can be misleading. He says, “Today, we are in the hyper-space of money printing.” Using price can be compared to building a house with a yard-stick that changes in length. Their focus is on the longer-term and not the day to day, they look for structure rather than short moves in momentum.
The bears are looking extremely foolish right now. The coronavirus appears to be in retreat and equities are roaring, US jobs data yesterday was taken as bullish, the Nasdaq scored a new all-time high the Dow Jones index closed just 8% off its all-time high and gold has been in retreat. So all is wonderful in the garden, right? I’m not so sure – in fact, I think things are setting up for another big crunch. To coin a phrase (from Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve): the markets are exhibiting irrational exuberance.
In December 2015 I published an explosive dossier which showed that AIM listed InternetQ (INTQ) was a fraud, clearly fabricating its user numbers in its Akazoo operation. This was an operation that top fund manager Martin Hughes hads invested in firstly PA and then via the funds managed at Tosca. InternetQ denied my claims but brought in no independent investigators, instead in a deal bankrolled by Tosca the company went private in early 2016. No scandal. It was all covered up.
Those who read my From Athens with Love dossier on InternetQ (INTQ) in 2015 when it was AIM listed will have been in no doubt that its users and sales were pure fiction. Today there is final vindication for me, this is yet another massive fraud from Greece.
The tug of war going on in the markets now between reality and full on Modern Monetary Theory makes the stock market all but uninvestable until it is clear which side prevails. At the moment the latter seems to have the upper hand, but it is early days and I suspect that reality is not done yet. On the short side, many zombie companies which have been propped up since the GFC with artificially low interest rates are now sensing a new lease of life as they rush to the seemingly limitless Covid trough, as moral hazard abounds. There are always exceptions however...
Investors love to look for signs of markets tops, a difficult task, except in hindsight. A favourite of the GFC of 2008 was the infamous comment by Citigroup’s Chuck Prince in July 2007; “As long as the music is playing you have to get up and dance." Now we have another Prince, this time Bob, co CIO of Bridgewater, who proclaimed at Davos the other day that we have seen the end of the boom bust cycle (remember the great Gordon Brown saying much the same in 2007?)...
……And they marched it down again. Woodford dog-pick extraordinaire, Aim- and Nasdaq- listed Mereo Biopharma (AIM: MPH, Nasdaq: MREO) announced what appeared to be good news yesterday, sending the AIM-listed shares up from 33p as high as 45.5p before they fell back down to 38p at the close yesterday. Meanwhile the Nasdaq stock put on around 48% at the peak, before giving up almost the entire gain to close up just 7%. The news was not so good after all!...
Hello Share Mates. Last week I commended a medical pioneer to your attention because it had just announced exciting news. The Nasdaq and AIM-listed Tiziana (TILS)was given an encouraging boost by the Harvard Medical School no less for a positive test for its Foralumab drug for boosting the immune system.
Yesterday we learnt from Citywire that Neil Woodford has dumped his holding in Nasdaq-listed Prothena (PRTA) for £50 million to San Francisco-based biotech investor EcoR1 Capital, ending another disastrous tale of woe. In the early days of Woodford Investment Management this was a star investment and Neil chucked in piles of other people’s money but last year it ran into trouble when its flagship treatment for amyloidosis failed in trials. In the good old days Woodford’s holding topped well over £500 million in value – and he’s got just £50 million for his 22% stake...
Hello, Share Schemers. Some of us have a warm feeling when we invest in a company which hopes to push back the onslaught of awful conditions like cancer. But it helps if the medical pioneer has a treatment under review which may have a good chance of working. So may I bring to your attention a company on both AIM and the Nasdaq...
On a recent podcast, @TeslaCharts, a prominent and distinguished member of the Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) bear community on twitter known as $TSLAQ, described the ingredients needed for the Tesla phenomenon as the Barbershop Quartet, which I thought aptly describes not just Tesla but the investment climate which we have, until recently, taken for granted...
Woodford dog Mereo Biopharma, with its “value-enhancing” (according to 31% holder Neil Woodford) merger with Nasdaq’s Oncomed all delivered, has continued to slide: the shares, having been 325p at IPO on AIM in 2016 and having been over 160p up until completion of the merger have now collapsed to just 81p.
Mereo Biopharma (MPH) is a typical Woodford dog: until a few days ago Neil had just shy of 42% of the equity in this cash-guzzling enterprise, which joined the AIM Casino back in June 2016 with a valuation of £142 million and a lofty share price of 325p, having raised £14.8 million, plus a convertible loan note worth another three million.
Hello Share Cringers. They tell us that 90% per cent of our worries never materialise. This could be the case with all those Brexit fears. And it seems that the Big City agrees. Because despite all the cynicism, share prices are holding up remarkably well. But there are some headwinds that are now’t to do with Brexit.
PDS Biotechnology (PDSB) joined Nasdaq just over a month ago following the merger of AIM-listed Netscientific (NSCI) investee PDS and previously Nasdaq-listed Edge Therapeutics. Netscientific – itself an investee of Neil Woodford - proudly told the market the listing was at $10 per share, but by the time the RNS came the following morning, the shares had already collapsed to $8.51.
The horrendous Q1 delivery numbers from Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) should have finally buried the growth story for all but the die hard believers and the focus now should move on to when it has to raise capital or file for bankruptcy…
No doubt Neil Woodford will be delighted that his good friends at Crystal Amber think they can realise the equivalent of 123p a share from Allied Minds (ALM). No matter it is a loss, it will be cash in the bank – much needed – IF Crystal gets control and IF the assets are worth what they think and IF they manage to sell them. Meanwhile, dear old Neil – having yet again spunked more other people’s money on Kier (KIE) which promptly fell to a new low - is now faced with a cash-call from Autolus (Nasdaq: AUTL). What will he do?
I speculated previously about what might be the catalyst for the great Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) unravel and since then I believe we may have seen it...
The year to date has not provided a very promising backdrop for bears. I - like many others - am intensely irritated by Donald Trump’s obsession with the level of the US market and his clearly seeing it as a barometer for his own genius. When he claimed late last year that the fourth quarter sell off was a blip and a buying opportunity I waited with grim satisfaction for the rude awakening that was sure to follow...
Oh dear, oh dear. This really is proof that Independent Oil & Gas (IOG) is - whatever its scumbag Nomad FinnCrap (FCAP) claims -complete toast. You will remember that Independent owes more than £30 million to unquoted London Oil & Gas. That money has to start being repaid within a few months and Independent will go bust unless London provides more funds. But London has borrowed money from LCF a related party firm subject to a full blown FCA raid as it is a ponzi fraud as we showed here yesterday. That cash is repayable on demand. Now read on....
It is true that it is not normally a great idea to short a company’s shares simply on the basis that its value is crazy because, as we all know, crazy can get a lot crazier. As a general rule it pays to wait for weakness in a crazy share price of, say 25%, rather than attempt to call the top.
It’s looking increasingly like Elon Musk’s go private “funding secured” tweet on the 7th August has backfired horribly as Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) now trades $40 below the prevailing price before he sent it. I was recently accused of confirmation bias on Tesla, i.e. of looking only at the bear case and ignoring the positives but it is difficult post-tweet to find any bullish case that holds water.
Writing on Akers Biosciences (AKR & NASDAQ - AKER) last month - “decided to withdraw” an initial FDA application… & worse, I concluded to run for the hills from this stock. Now, the shares are slumping again – this time on a “Notification of Class Action” announcement. Uh oh…
US biotech firm MiMedx (NASDAQ - MDXG) has announced that none of its financial statements going back to 2012 can be relied upon and that it is still unable to file for Q4 2017 and Q1 2018. Its CFO was leaving with immediate effect to be replaced by one Edward Borkowski, who had previously tended the books of Canadian pharma company Concordia until it went bankrupt.
In these benign markets, the word “catalyst” is heard frequently among bears. They may agree that they have found a real turkey, but fret about what specific event will engender a sudden loss of confidence and resultant share price fall. I suggested recently that a cash crunch is the most reliable catalyst for a correction, but it’s not that straightforward as demonstrated by two of my favourite shorts - Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) and Telit (TCM), both of which have traded sideways for a while.
A slump in shares in Akers Biosciences (AKR & NASDAQ - AKER) was noted in Bearcast yesterday, what’s the detail?...
I had to laugh last night when I saw PrimaryBid’s pre-Bank Holiday offer to the likes of you and me - Mereo Biopharma (MPH) - as although there’s some stiff competition, I think this must the worst deal offered up to-date and, in fact, worse than the other offer of a lifetime that I’m currently working out how to avoid, namely dinner at the in-laws during the Champions League final!
Yesterday I listed 30 of the FTSE100 with high enough yields to interest me, noting that the yield on the FTSE100 as a whole was substantially higher than 30-year US treasuries and a country mile ahead of 30-year gilts. Of course, having a big yield doesn’t make them a buy automatically – just for starters, is the yield sustainable? But now I want to compare the performance of the FTSE100 with other indices around the world. It makes for a striking comparison.
This is a total car crash video interview with Longfin's (LFIN) CEO and CNBC. I discussed the insanity of Nasdaq star Longfin in bearcast yesterday but the CEO seems to agree with me about the valuatiuon. Meanwhile as he discusses related party deals and other matters he is quite simply taken apart. But I admire his honesty. This chap surely shows the way for OnLine (ONL) boss Clem Chambers. Enjoy...
I wrote a while back that Tesla (TSLA - NASDAQ) would be a cracking short if and when its shares break down below $300. They didn’t quite make it, rebounding sharply from $308. But the rally looks like it has run out of steam and they are heading south again.
There has been much merriment in the bear community recently with the spectacle of short seller Marc Cohodes more or less single-handedly exposing the shenanigans at Toronto listed sub-prime lender Home Capital Group on his twitter feed. The debacle has now become main stream news in Canada and Marc has attained a kind of rock star status amongst his burgeoning army of followers.
BNN Technology (BNN) has duly announced its prelims for the year to Dec 2016. First of all: hats off to broker Mirabaud for finding punters willing to throw a further £25 million at the company on top of £51 million stumped up last year.
Poster child for the dogs on AIM heading for zero is Avanti Communications (AVN) which plumbed new lows this week with a dreadful H1 statement. For a supposedly maturing business to have interest expenses more than turnover is astounding. This is a product of its recent insane more-debt-for-debt swap.
As a boy I would eagerly await the start of each month. Before I went to bed I said hares brown hares and my first words on waking would be rabbits white rabbits. That was meant to bring you luck. These days the start of the month ritual ( well six days in) involves chortling at the latest dire statistics AIM provides about itself. November was as bad as prior months. AIM is nothing if not consistent.
Nasdaq listed GrubHub is one of many companies offering an app to allow you to order food from your local restaurants. Its boss Matt Maloney was a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton and he has just committed commercial suicide for his company after telling Trump supporting workers to resign. #BoycottGrubHub is trending on twitter across the USA.
A glance at the chart of GW Pharmaceuticals (GWP), the developer of Cannabis based cures for a variety of diseases, since its appearance on AIM some fifteen years ago perfectly demonstrates the fact that when it comes to ramping and promoting drug companies the health obsessed Americans have no equal.
China is opening down another 2% today. Almost half the stocks out East are still halted or suspended so what is today’s (failing) panic reaction from the Authorities? Yes – arrest the bears, putt the pandas in cuffs because as we all know, the only reason shares fall is because of evil bears. Rob Terry really should list his latest fraud Quob Park in China.
Cambridge-headquartered consumer electronics technology company CSR plc (CSR) has announced an agreement to extend the deadline for Nasdaq-listed Microchip Technology Inc. to announce a firm intention or not to make a takeover offer. The following updates with shares in CSR currently more than 7% higher on the day at 782p.
It is now quite clear, after my shock revelations today HERE, that Naibu (NBU) is a total Norfolk and is going to 0p. And this is only the latest of a number of Chinese based Norfolks to list on the AIM casino. Good Chinese stocks list in Hong Kong or Shanghai, bad ones on NASDAQ and total stinkers and outright Norfolks on AIM. Well that is my view - hence the advice to dump shares in Camkids (CAMK) and China Chaintek (CTEK) as well as Naibu. What do you think? Which of the following statements most closely reflects your views:
The market has not reacted well to interims from Vislink (VLK) marking the stock down to 45p but research Equity Development reckons that Mr Market has got it very wrong. It predicts a “blowout” second half boosted by a five year partnership with Nasdaq listed Harmonic (US:HLIT), reckons that its own 2015 numbers are cautious and has increased its target price from 70p to 75p.
Having previously looked at whether Cambridge-headquartered consumer electronics technology provider CSR plc (CSR) was the next London-listed stock set to be taken over, the situation has further developed with a statement from prospective acquirer, NASDAQ-listed Microchip Technology Inc. In the following I review that statement and the prospects for CSR.
