Classic:

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Many people are astonished that the stock markets have continued to climb in spite of a plethora of insurmountable roadblocks. One can get dizzy just naming all the obstacles in the way of a recovery: personal debt, government debt, Dollar collapse, Iran’s nukes, global warming, the lack of a terrible Nick Cage movie in theaters, and so on. There seems to be no explanation for the meteoric rise we have witnessed in our 401(k) accounts, other than “the market is unpredictable.”

Well, I’ve got news for you: there is a very simple explanation for the miraculous recovery we’ve seen and will continue to see for a long, long time — and said explanation is comprised of only two wonderful, heroic words: Brett Favre.

You see, the stock market bottomed on March 9, which was about the time “coming out of retirement” rumblings started seeping out of the crap-hole where Brett Favre called home (somewhere in Mississippi). Brett’s agonizing decision captured hearts and minds across the country.

What? Unemployment is exploding? Iran might have nukes? H1N1 might kill everyone? How can I be expected to focus on any of that jibber jabber when Brett Favre might be coming to play for the Vikings?

The 3rd quarter started on July 1 and ended on September 30. During that time, the market rose by over 20%. Well, not coincidentaly, also during that time Brett Favre signed a contract, suited up, and played in a couple games for the Vikings.

If you think these events are unrelated, why don’t you go slug down a bottle of whiskey in Nouriel Roubini’s dungeon and try to predict the next crash? Now that I think of it, if you do that, can I go with? Roubini has to be a dud to party with, but who doesn’t love hammering down cheap whiskey in a dark basement?

About a week ago my chronically aching back started feeling good again, the groundhog that was destroying my landscaping moved to the neighbor’s yard, and I found a box of 15-year old porn from college in my basement. That was Brett Favre working more miracles.

Do you know what Brett Favre does when he’s not playing football? He sits in his lawn wearing his Wrangler jeans and no shirt while holding onto a really long rope that keeps the Earth in its present orbit. Who takes over on Sundays? I don’t know, because whoever it is, it is not Brett Favre so I do not care.

This brings me to my predictions: What about the 4th quarter? Well, you’ve seen Brett Favre in the 4th quarter this year, right? What do YOU think is going to happen? When will the next market crash be? It will happen when Brett Favre decides it will happen, and not one minute before or after. Believe it.

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If you are in the market for a “new” car like I am, you’ll want to stay on top of Ford’s (F) cutting-edge products (HT: Adam Burrows):

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I Short Sold My Neighbor’s House

StocksConsumer GoodsFTMDAIHMC

This evening I was sipping on some California wine when I had the most American of entrepreneurial ideas (to get rich): short sell my neighbor’s house.

That modern cave has been on the market for several months and we’re about to head into the seasonal slow period. I’ve seen some glossy graphs and charts in the local paper showing prices should dip at least 5% in the winter.

I quickly walked outside to get the real estate agent’s number off the For Sale sign. I’ve passed it a trillion times, but I have a neurological-type popup blocker protecting me from anything with Glamor Shots and a sales pitch.

After some extremely brief haggling (i.e., the agent asked for a high price, and I said, “No.” The agent came down 10%, and I said, “No.” Etc.), we arrived at what I considered a great deal. As a sweetener, I even told her to forgo any improvements or an inspection. I am short-selling this house …

So, to make a short story shorter, the agent created a legal agreement with me by which I borrowed the house to sell now, I could buy it back for less in the winter, and then return it to the current “owners” (such a frail term).

Sure, there were issues about who would occupy the house and when, what if I can’t buy back the house later, am I artificially driving down the market if I am selling something I do not “own”, etc. But the agent and I consider those pesky deal-breakers only lawyers would get neurotic about. Besides, if this financial scheme works with stocks, why not houses? This is America. It’s a free country.

So, if you are up this way sometime between Christmas and late February, give me a call. I have a risk-free investment you might be interested in seeing …

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The Cramer-Roubini X-treme Index

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Case and Shiller have one. Dow and Jones have one. Black and Scholes have something similar …

Wall St. Cheat Sheet is proud to introduce our first proprietary index: The Cramer-Roubini X-treme Index. After toiling with quantum proofs and a stack of “For Dummies” books for years in the basement of Duke University’s Lilly Library, we have finally produced the perfect blend of Doom and Boom suffused with a subtle hint of X-Games adrenaline.

Unlike the VIX or other sentiment indexes which somehow fell into the shit pit during the Great Markets (Housing, Stocks, Credit, Oil, etc.) Crashes of 2008, The Cramer-Roubini X-treme Index held up like a Viagra induced E! party on The Girls Next Door. That’s right. While those old bags Dow and Jones couldn’t tell you what the hell was happening, our needle jolted from Cramer to Roubini faster than food passes through an American tourist who just ate a spoiled egg in Thailand.

By now you’re probably scratching your head trying to reverse engineer our black box indicator (which, by the way, is available to institutional and accredited investors for annual licensing at the bargain price of the US National Debt divided by 100). Don’t give yourself the mathematician’s cold sweats or the Bible Code mystic’s shiver. If you’re not an institutional investor or don’t qualify as an accredited investor, please read on (if you are one of the aforementioned investors, please pay now) …

The secret to our indicator is its lack of cutting-edge technology. We employ a Luddite style system where a handful of college interns sit in front of 52″ flat screens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week watching CNBC, Bloomberg, and FOX Business. Each time an unpaid viewer sees either Cramer or Roubini, he or she registers the viewing by clicking a baseball umpire’s out counter. We know it only goes to three, but we’ve hired some cum laude quality interns to do the higher math on paper from our recycling bin.

At the end of each session, we tally the Cramer and Roubini sightings on a huge chalkboard. Whoever has the most appearances on the three networks plus comments as “experts” in major print media outlets (which are monitored overseas, but that’s a story for another article), that person becomes what Billboard would call our Top Pop Hit.

Once we have a clear shepherd of the times, we can then determine whether we are in a bull or bear market. Moreover, we can monitor extremes of fear and greed as either Cramer or Roubini will slip outside the smokey corridors of Wall Street and end up at places like the Today Show, MySpace’s Most Popular Playa’ List, or even the White House.

So, there you have it. No longer must you waste time hearing Cramer call a bottom in housing or stocks every time the markets decline 5%. And the days are gone when you are forced to spend years watching your friends get rich while your self-proclaimed prophet Roubini tells you the end is near. Simply purchase an umpire’s counter at Dick’s, hit your couch, open a bag of your favorite chips, and start clicking your way to riches …

Stay tuned for updates to our Cramer-Roubini X-treme Index — we are rigorously backtesting whether public feuds between the two men indicate a sideways market.

If you are interested in real-time market analysis, click here to follow Wall St. Cheat Sheet on Twitter.

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C-suite sources at corporate conglomerate GE tell me that a “Big shakeup” is coming at the company’s media subsidiary CNBC. Following a dismal quarter during which CNBC watched 28% of their viewers upgrade from hitting ‘mute’ to pressing ‘off’, Six-Sigma aficionados at 30-Rock (the building, not the show) ran their Japanese-style efficiency programs. The results included some of the following strategic changes:

• Self-proclaimed entertainer and Starbucks junkie Jim Cramer will be encouraged to take a deal as the replacement for infomercial legend Billy Mays. The popular Mad Money slot will be replaced with a new show called, Thoughtful Investing. The show will be hosted by Minyanville CEO Todd Harrison.
• Permabull and free-market extremist Larry Kudlow has been traded to FOX for a few unnamed fourth-round draft picks. He will be replaced by economic realist Barry Ritholtz. Ritholtz is the CEO and Chief-Strategist of FusionIQ as well as the sober voice behind the most popular single-author finance blog The Big Picture.
• Argumentum ad hominem debater Dennis Kneale will lose his nearly unwatched WWE-style shout fest with bloggers. Six-Sigma experts concluded Kneale’s audience was 90% bloggers, which makes the show more of a televised online chatroom than anything remotely resembling financial media. The Six-Sigma folks also spent 2.3 minutes determining that 0.000000000000001% of Kneale’s audience of bloggers actually converted to customers for CNBC advertisers in Kneale’s slot. Kneale will be replaced by up-and-coming CNN Money reporter Poppy Harlow who will host a show reporting on real issues unfolding within the economy.
• Squawk-Box farts Joe Kernen and Carl Quintanilla will jump from the sell-side to the buy-side as head publicists in the PR group at Charles Schwab.

Despite dropping an incredibly overdue nuclear bomb at the most-muted television station in the world, reporters David Faber and Maria Bartiromo will remain at CNBC. The two journalists will now be allowed to reach their potential like Lebron James did once the  Cleveland Cavaliers brought in a worthy supporting cast.

As with all stories at CNBC, this one is “Breaking-News” and like their website always notes, “(story developing).”

For those who did not read the category for this post, this is a satire.

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This post was originally published by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge.

Prospectus Supplement to Prospectus dated August 19, 2009.

$30,000,000,000 *

(subject to arbitrary increase)

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

in conjunction with

United States Treasury Department

is pleased to offer you the following

0% Subordinated HFT Participation Notes

in the

GSBS I (Goldman Sachs Bonus Securitization *)

*for legal reasons, Goldman Sachs Group will not use the word “Trust” to describe this entity

The 0% Subordinated HFT Participation Notes represent a securitization of forward-looking executive-retention payments, payable to Goldman Sachs employees. The Notes will pay interest in the form of negative-accrual on the notes on August 19 and February 19 of each year. The first such negative-accrual will be made on February 19, 2010. The Notes WILL NOT be guaranteed by Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. or any of its affiliates. The HFT Notes will be collateralized by proceeds from the bond and an indirect guarantee from the United States Treasury. Both the GSBS I collateral and Treasury Guarantee are for the sole benefit of the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive retention program, not holders of the HFT Notes. In the event that GSBS I collateral is not sufficient to meet the “2010 Bonus Payment Amount”, the United States Treasury has provided a full and unconditional guarantee for any shortfall in payment amount.

At the earlier of the scheduled maturity date (December 31, 2010) or the “Bonus Payment Date”, all principal outstanding for the HFT Notes will be extinguished. At the maturity, all collateral in the GSBS I entity will be paid out to executives, which will result in zero recovery value for the HFT Notes. In exchange for the participating in this HFT Note transaction, participating holders will be “exempted” from front-running by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. proprietary and high-frequency trading activities. Such exemption period will last until the “Bonus Payment Date”, at which point Holders of the HFT Notes will be subject to front-running, dark-pools, scalping, and other trading actions that Goldman Sachs Group Inc., in its sole discretion, deems appropriate. If Goldman Sachs becomes obligated to pay additional amounts to non-U.S. investors due to changes in U.S. withholding tax requirements, Goldman Sachs may redeem the notes before their stated maturity at a price equal to 100% of the principal amount redeemed plus accrued interest to the redemption date.

Neither the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission nor any other regulatory body has approved or disapproved of these securities or passed upon the accuracy or adequacy of this prospectus. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense. If such criminal offense is committed by a Goldman Sachs employee, it will not be prosecuted.

Initial public offering price 99.858 % $ 29,957,400,000

Underwriting discount 0.450 % $ 135,000,000

Proceeds, before expenses, to Goldman Sachs 99.408 % $ 29,822,400,000

Proceeds to Goldman Sachs executives 99.408 % $ 29,822,400,000

Goldman Sachs may use this prospectus supplement and the accompanying prospectus in the initial sale of the notes. In addition, Goldman, Sachs & Co. or any other affiliate of Goldman Sachs may use this prospectus supplement and the accompanying prospectus in a market-making transaction in the notes after their initial sale, and unless they inform the purchaser otherwise in the confirmation of sale, this prospectus supplement and accompanying prospectus is being used by them in a market-making transaction.

Goldman, Sachs & Co.

United States Government

Disclaimer:

Any resemblance to bonds or securitization pools, actual or imaginary, positive or negative-accrual, issued by Goldman Sachs or The United States Government, is purely coincidental. No puppies were hammered to death in the preparation of this lampoon.

This is a guest post by Joshua Brown at The Reformed Broker.

The ProShares Ultra Short Financial ETF, otherwise called SKF, has had one of the most spectacular flame-outs in market history.  One minute, SKF was a superstar, raking in millions of dollars on a daily basis and dominating the most actives list.  Then suddenly, the party was over.

This is the E! True Hollywood Story of SKF, Star of the Credit Crisis.

February 2007

Baby SKF is born on a wintry day at the ProShares HQ in Bethesda, MD.  Just like his inverse twin, UYG, SKF was born at $70 per share on the American Stock Exchange.

SKF: I started shorting banks like, immediately.  In fact, I was ultra shorting them, predominantly through the use of swaps contracts as opposed to outright short sales.  Bank of America, Citi, Goldman…you name ‘em, I was short ‘em.

July 2007

SKF was in the right place at the right time from day one.  In the midst of an overheating stock market, Bear Stearns came out in the middle of July with the admission that two of it’s internal sub prime hedge funds were in trouble.

SKF: This was my first big break.  Even though I wasn’t short a lot of Bear stock, I knew I was onto something big.  Every morning, my agents would email me clippings of mortgage-backed securities stories from the media.  The rest of the bank and broker stocks started getting jittery and I was getting hooked on the volatility, big time!

February 2008

SKF celebrated it’s first birthday amidst a Dow Jones that had already lost 2000 points from it’s peak.  SKF was flirting with $100 per share and the momentum traders had just started showing up at it’s party.

SKF: The scene was intense, man.  The StockTwits guys started tweeting about me like crazy and I was all they could talk about on the Yahoo Finance message boards.  People all over the market started to hear my name.  I ain’t gonna lie, it felt good.  Felt like I was important.  So what that Bear Stearns was about to be shuttered and that the foreclosures were starting to get rolling.  I was gonna be famous!

September 2008

The drizzle of financial distress has now become a tsunami as Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt and Merrill Lynch is rescued by BAC.  SKF breaks above $100 per share and looks like he’s finally bound for the big time.

SKF: “This is it,” I thought, “I’m the biggest star on Wall Street”.  Everyone wanted a piece of me!  Traders, hedge fund guys, brokers, Ameritrade cats…I was the most widely-followed, most in-demand vehicle out there, and man was I livin’ it up.  Courtside seats at the Garden, happy hour at the Gansevoort Hotel.  I remember being offered a table at Rao’s with Woody Allen  that Saturday night after dining at Elaine’s with the cast of Wicked the night before.  I had finally arrived.

SRS: I gotta admit, I was a little jealous.  I mean, real estate investments were melting down way faster than banks…where was my invite to Rao’s?

November 2008

As the credit crisis extends beyond US banks and into the rest of the world’s industries, SKF ultimately takes out $300 per share, a quadruple from it’s initial price.  Drugs, booze and loose women are everywhere as the party feels like it will never end.

SKF: Dude, it’s all a blur.  I mean, Citigroup goes under a dollar…CITIGROUP!  Under a buck!  AIG to 40 cents?  WaMu spits the bit?  Oh my gosh!  There are chicks and money everywhere, limos picking me up at the close of trading.  I would get VIP tables at The Box with my friends SRS (UltraShort Real Estate) and QID (UltraShort NASDAQ) and we would just pimp!  We thought we were unstoppable all winter.

March 2009

And that’s when it all came crashing down.  After months of relentless shorting and selling, Goldman and Morgan were able to become bank holding companies and access the TARP.  This combined with the Treasury and Fed backstopping Citi and orchestrating mergers put a floor under the banks that would ultimately hold.  The S&P 500 would run 20% from the March low, take a break and then run another 20% through the summer.

SRS: SKF became a total mess.  He kept on partying, but less and less people started showing up.  His name was off every guestlist and people wouldn’t even look at us when we walked into a room.

SKF: All the traders that I thought were my friends disappeared to hang out with FAS (3x banks) and TNA (3x small caps).  There were Triple Longs out there now and I was dropped like a hot potato.  The party was truly over, I guess.

August 2009

In the end, SKF lost about 90% from it’s highest point, now worth only $30 per share.  There’s been talk of a reverse split as the ravages of compounding eat away at his NAV each day.  After a brief stint in rehab, SKF came home to Bethesda to be reconciled with his long-lost brother UYG.  Many other leveraged former ETF stars have found themselves out of the limelight as brokerage firms across the country have banned them from client accounts and the VIX has dropped to the low 20’s.

SKF’s story was one of incredible rallies and horrific plunges, of wild success and soul-crushing failure.  It was the rise and fall of an ETF superstar.

If you are interested in real-time market analysis, click here to follow Wall St. Cheat Sheet on Twitter.

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Lenny Dykstra, A Man of Deep Thoughts

During the past several months of the financial crisis, we have seen a ton of villains surface from Dante’s 9th Circle of Hell. I knew Lenny Dykstra’s day was coming for three (call them common sense) reasons:

1. Several friends on Wall St. told me he has run more than one scam in which he raised capital and effectively stole the money;
2. I have seen his options trading strategy on his website and he had been perpetually averaging down on bad picks (which is the bullet train to bankruptcy); and,
3. I saw Lenny on Real Sports when he said he doesn’t like to read because it’s too confusing.

In the following video, John Stewart continues his Jonathan Swift style account of the absurd loss of reason during the economic bubbles of the past few years. Like Zoolander, I guess Dykstra will now have time to work on his Lenny Dykstra Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too:

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