Barry Ritholtz answering the question,

“Why so skeptical?”

Excerpt:

I hear that question way too often. The short answer is that after a few decades on Wall Street, you learn that when a lot of any money is at stake, people quite easily become completely and totally full of bullshit.

This is why I (to quote someone else) “consistently doubt everything, especially government and mainstream media, and asks questions that have readers asking their own questions.”

The most egregious example in recent memory landed on the front page of the Sunday NYT:

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found…

Go read the full article — but not on a full stomach . . .”

Source:
Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
DAVID BARSTOW
NYT, April 20, 2008

…

BIDU just made our day in the $10,000 Portfolio (now over $15,000).  How appropriate that BIDU was the first trade we made when we initiated the portfolio on 3/22!

What a difference a week makes!  I was just whining about that ill-timed IBM trade and our hopeless oil puts over the weekend and I’ll admit I’ve been a little trigger shy this week as I didn’t want to risk an earnings play in the $10KP until I saw where we stood.

We’ve been in and out of Bidu a lot this year and we made 2 spectacular trades on it last year so it’s a stock we know well, which is why we committed 2 spreads to it in our $10KP.

Kudos to HappyTrading, King of WangsWorld, who, along with BillBigD, made a great timing trade on this stock back in January.  On 1/9, Happy said: "BIDU - Similar to GOOG, but, more momemtum! In with Jan 125 calls @ $2.9 (thought about it at $2.7, but, didn’t act fast enough)."  Two days later he hit it on the mark with:  "I’m out of BIDU. 130 is high, although it might go higher; but, I watch it for other entry points."

On 1/11 I warned: "BIDU will get dragged down by China if it collapses. If the Dow was at 20,000 and Google was at $950 would you be jumping on the $…

Note to Non-Members:

We usually don’t post member picks at all but Google options are nice and fluid so we are posting these up now that the members have filled positions.  It was certainly not expected that is would be an $8 up day but the good news is you can pretty much bracket all these picks up one unit to affect the same spreads.  If I were starting these picks out from scratch I would wait until Goggle either makes a confirmed breakout over $475 to buy into the higher brackets or I would simply reverse the strategy, start buying the cheaper puts and hope for a pullback so you can pick up the calls pre earnings (Thursday).

My post-earnigns target is $490, with a possible spike back to test the highs at $510 - assuming the earnings are good.  Less than 2% of this stock is sold short so it’s not going to get squeezed, it will take a change in sentiment, something new and exciting to get this one moving big but we already got double last week’s volume today with good price action, finishing just under the 2/22 low.

Here is the original members article, I will now be updating these figures live for all as the trades move forward:

My thanks to Happy Trading for these charts:

Google has recently entered into a period of lower volatility, coupled with low volume.

Have people lost interest in Google or is the stock wound up like a coiled spring ready to explode?

…

What a surprise! 

You CAN go too far in this country… 

I was in a bad mood in last week’s wrap up as I saw the WSJ moving into the Criminal Narrators Boosting Crude camp and I said then that, to find the motivation behind this nonsense we need to "just follow the money."  This week THE MONEY gave us a real demonstration of it’s power by removing a major US political broadcaster for saying the wrong thing.

I’m no Imus fan and I don’t think what he said was in the least bit defensible but, for MSNBC (same umbrella as CNBC) to dump him the second a few sponsors pull their cash, only  accomplishes putting a great big "Ethics for Sale" sign on the network.  Had they suspended or fired him immediately, that would be different but this was purely a dollar driven decision.  The man put out the pictured album years ago and, for goodness sake, he wears a cowboy hat in the studio, not exactly the outfit of choice at the Million Man March, and this was certainly not his first time making a racist comment.

…

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism - Hunter S. Thompson

I apologize in advance to David Luhnow, who is only a staff writer at the Journal and just so happened to write the wrong article at the wrong time to really tick me off.  He is just an example and I bear no particular ill will towards him…

It’s bad enough that this country is forced to endure Criminal Narrators Boosting Crude and their 24-hour sponsored pump-fest.   Bad enough that they choose to give a forum to oil extortionists and peak-oil fanatics while delighting in this plague of high prices that has cost the American people $240Bn a year in windfall profits. 

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason." - Hunte…

My thanks to Trader Mike, who wrote a nice article on a subject we had been discussing all weekend on the member site as all the market manipulation of the past two days made me forget to talk about the evidence of market manipulation we uncovered last week.

<==  Prof posted this clip on Friday and in which Cramer discusses how easy it is (and how he did) to manipulate the markets by pushing stocks up, down and all around virtually at will with the enlisted cooperation of the financial press, who would print whatever spin he wanted.

"This is blatantly illegal but when you have 6 days (to end the Q) and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it’s really important to foment, if I were one of these guys, an impression that RIMM (the example) isn’t any good."  Jim goes on to describe in great detail how he could spend just $15M to $20M to "knock RIMM down, which would be fabulous because it would beleaguer all the moron longs…"  

In the context, he was talking about RIMM as it was a fulcrum stock, one that moved a large portion of the market (like Valero) where the funds would concentrate their energy in order to rally (or crush) the broader markets.

…

 "I’M MELTING! MELTING! OH, WHAT A WORLD, WHAT A WORLD…" - The Wicked Witch of the West

All it took at the end of the story to vanquish the all-powerful witch was a splash of cold water in the face.  Interestingly, there is speculation that the original book was a political parable and that the witch represented the evil Standard Oil corporation (now Exxon) who, in 1900 when the book was written, were aligned with the Wall Street crooks of the time and the railroads to force landowners off their property by using the "humbug" of the gold (troy Oz) - backed dollar (emerald) standard to control the money supply in order to force farmers off their land and drive their competitors out of business.

The election of 1896 was all about a contest between "goldbugs" and "silverites" (In the book, Dorothy’s all-powerful slippers were silver, not ruby).  Silver was a readily available commodity at the time and could be freely coined, providing a liquid and accessible  means of exchange that would free the "good people" of the heartland (the North and the South) from they tyranny of the industrial witches of the East and the West.  Dorothy, the proxy for the average American, gets her silver shoes early on but doesn’t know what to do with them so she must follow the gold to Washington ("follow the money" whispered Deep Throat to Woodward and Bernstein) where, in the end, she discovers that the Wizard is nothing but a fraud, elevated to his office by happenstance and kept alive by deception, literall…