Mobile Trading Surges In India As Retail Joins Stock Market Party

From Zero Hedge:

The rise of mobile daytraders has been a global phenomenon during the pandemic. From the US to Europe to China to India, pajama traders swinging stock and options positions from their smartphones steadily increased as global central banks printed trillions of dollars and ignited a historic rally in world stocks. 

Central bank balance sheets expanded rapidly as pandemic began. 

World stocks drop on the pandemic, but V-shaped recovered as central banks unleashed trillions of dollar into global markets. It was the run-up when retail decided to download mobile apps for trading and join the stock market party. 

More recently, daytraders in China have seen a chaotic melt-up catapult the tech-heavy ChiNext index 40% in the last 30 trading sessions. 

US daytraders using the Robinhood mobile app bored during virus lockdowns with no sports and confined to their homes, panic bought shares of bankrupted companies, outpaced hedge funds in returns over the last several months.   

The rise of daytraders using smartphones has also become popular in India. Mobile trading recently overtook internet-based trading in cash markets. 

Nitin Kamath, founder, and CEO of Zerodha, told BloombergQuint, inexpensive smartphones have made mobile trading more accessible to the masses who don't have access to a desktop computer or traditional stockbroker. 

Official data via the National Stock Exchange of India shows mobile trading turnover in cash markets increased 9-percentage-points to 23% since February, compared against the 4-percentage-point rise to 13% for internet trading during the period. 

As of June, the mobile share of trading on the National Stock Exchange was about a quarter of all traders. 

Upstox, an Indian discount brokerage firm operated by RKSV Securities India Pvt., which has a mobile app for trading - has seen a rapid increase in users this year: 

"Over the last year, Upstox has on-boarded a large number of digitally savvy traders from non-metro cities," Ravi Kumar, co-founder, said in a statement. "Over 80% of the total customer base acquired by the company is from tier-2 and tier-3 cities like Nashik, Jaipur, Guntur, Patna, Kannur, Tiruvallur & Nainital and among others. Currently, almost 75% of the total customer base is below the age of 35." 

BloombergQuint notes, "as more investors flock to equity markets, shares of listed brokerages surged in the last three months. ICICI Securities, IIFL Securities Ltd., 5paisa Capital Ltd. and Motilal Oswal Financial Services Ltd. jumped 33-101% during the period." 

NIFTY's rising wedge broke - can't get too excited about this pattern's downside break. 

Retail is going all-in into equity markets during a global pandemic, worldwide recession, and central banks juicing stock markets with trillions of dollars will ultimately end in tears.

We've already outlined Robinhood traders blowing up their accounts by taking out too much leverage. 

• Robinhood Trader's Suicide Is Warning For Millennial Investors
• ‪"Almost $1 Million Disappeared": A Robinhood Horror Story

And how will this all end for inexperienced daytraders using mobile apps to panic buy stocks across the world at record high valuations? Well, Leon Cooperman recently said it 'won't end well'. 

Bill Ackman's New "The Simpsons"-Inspired Investment Raises $4BN In "Largest IPO For A SPV"

From Zero Hedge:

Bill Ackman's "The Simpsons"-inspired "blank check" investing vehicle, known as "Pershing Square Tontine Holdings", is set to raise between $3 billion and $4 billion during its upcoming IPO after Ackman increased the size of the offering by $1 billion.

The deal, which will be the largest-ever IPO by a special purpose vehicle, a legal entity created to fulfill a specific, narrow purpose, will go public by offering 200,000,000 units, each 'unit' including one share of common stock and 1/9th of one redeemable warrant, plus a warrant that comes with special restrictions, at a price of $20.

Typically, a tontine is an investing arrangement where buyers are paid an annuity until they die. As holders die, the annuity paid to everyone else grows, until the last surviving investor receives whatever is left in the pot. It experienced peak popularity in 18th and 19th-Century France.

Ackman's fund won't function like a traditional tontine, but the Ackaman name has allowed him to offer 200 million units for $20 a piece.

As WSJ explained in a piece published on Monday, these "blank-check" companies are essentially big pools of cash that are listed on an exchange. Their sole purpose is typically to acquire a private company. Once that happens, the private firm essentially takes the 'blank check' firm's place on the exchange. The IPO market still hasn't recovered from last year's string of embarrassments (though several companies that debuted in the class of 2019 are now trading far above their offering levels), and the 'blank check' is a backdoor for companies looking to list, but don't feel confident about market conditions for an IPO. So, instead, they can work out a deal with somebody like Ackman, with the idea that he can use his credibility to raise more capital.

The fund hasn't stipulated what sector it's supposed to be targeting, though filings have stated that "mature, VC-backed unicorns" are an area of interest. The fund has also cited large IPO candidates, PE-backed companies in need of capital and private and family owned businesses worth more than $10 billion.

Deals like these have been on the rise lately as investors grow increasingly skittish of IPOs despite the market's recent comeback.

Source: WSJ

According to BBG, the fund could eventually raise as much as $7 billion with additional funds from other Ackman-controlled vehicles.

"We will have the largest amount of committed capital of any blank check company upon the completion of this offering," the company stated in the filing. Reuters reported on the initial confidential filing alerting the SEC to the deal earlier this month. 

As WSJ explained on July 13, it could eventually raise as much as $7 billion, including contributions of between $1 billion to $3 billion from funds associated with Pershing Square.

That's a risky proposition for an investor whose major wins have been huge, and whose failures have been disastrous. Though his lifetime earnings are still respectably in the green, Ackman has taken his share of "L"s, from investments in JC Penney, to Valeant to his infamous campaign against Herbalife, which he eventually abandoned.

While the esoteric nature of Ackman's new vehicle might, at first blush, seem only of interest to hard-core finance nerds, it's worth noting that the concept of a "tontine", the form that Ackman is using for this new vehicle, was made popular by one of the most popular episodes of "The Simpsons": "The Flying Hellfish".

Netflix's "Unsolved Mysteries" Reboots Mysterious 2006 Death Of Stansberry Research Employee

Zero Hedge:

Netflix has rebooted the once popular series Unsolved Mysteries, where various unexplained phenomena are highlighted and the show asks viewers for tips and information that could help lead to answers. The reboot has been a resounding success since it has been re-released, with internet sleuths flooding message boards and Reddit threads with their theories about each episode. 

Many of the cases revolve around murder mysteries, disappearances and occasionally the UFO or ghost story. In the streaming service's first episode of the reboot, now available on Netflix, well known stock newsletter tycoon Porter Stansberry, of Stansberry Research, is discussed extensively after the mysterious death of his former best friend and one of his former employees.

Episode one of the series highlights the case of a 32 year old newlywed named Rey Rivera, who picked up his life to move across the country to Baltimore and to work for his friend Porter Stansberry. Rivera was doing video editing for Stansberry's company at the time he died. 

Rivera was seen alive on May 16, 2006, but his body "was found six days later in an abandoned room in the second-story annex of the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore," according to Radio Times.

The last phone call that he received, before rushing out of the house, "was tracked to the switchboard of Stansberry & Associates, though who it was from remains a mystery." The area Rivera was found dead was nearby to Stansberry's offices. 

A mysterious hole was found in the roof of the annex, suggesting that Rivera may have fallen through the roof. But his personal belongings, including his glasses and his cell phone seemed to be in good working order. Additionally, he had fractures in his shin bones and other areas that made it difficult for the medical examiner to pinpoint a cause of death. 

Ultimately, Baltimore Police ruled his death a suicide, despite the medical examiner calling it "inconclusive". As Netflix points out, he would have had to have jumped outward 45 feet from the nearest roof to land where he did. 

Thus, the mystery of the case is how Rivera wound up plunging through the roof, if he even did.

Rivera also left behind a mysterious sounding note that included language with ties to Freemasonry. At one point, it said: “brothers and sisters, around the world right now volcanoes are erupting, what an awesome sight,” a line with ties to Freemasonry.

Porter Stansberry didn't actively participate in the Netflix show and the documentary alleges he put his company under a gag order just hours after Rivera was found dead. That claim was disputed by Stansberry on July 3.

According to Esquire: 

The Netflix documentary claims that Porter Stansberry refused to speak to or cooperate with investigators or media following Rey Rivera’s disappearance and death, and gag ordered his company’s employees from doing so as well.

On July 3, a spokesperson for the company disputed claims made in the Netflix episode, denying that Stansberry’s employees had ever been barred from speaking about Rivera's case.

“There was no gag order or direction given to employees to not speak to the press, law enforcement or any other party," a spokesperson for Stansberry Research told the Baltimore Sun last week.

You can watch the trailer for the episode here:

The internet is replete with theories and analysis about this episode, like this video, as well. 

'People Are Going To Be Shocked': Bannon Claims Wuhan Lab Employees Have Defected, Are Working With FBI

From Zero Hedge:

One day after a report that a respected Chinese virologist fled Hong Kong to accuse Beijing of a COVID cover-up, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told the Daily Mail that scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs have defected to the West and are "turning over evidence" against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for their role in the COVID-19 pandemic which has claimed over 560,000 lives worldwide since last December.

"People are going to be shocked," Bannon told the  Mail ("from a yacht off the East coast of America," the Mail would like us to know).

The 66-year-old then said that defectors are cooperating with intelligence agencies in America, Europe and the UK, which have been assembling evidence to challenge the CCP claim that the pandemic originated in a wet market - not in a lab home to scientists who have come under fire for manipulating bat coronavirus to be more transmissible to humans.

"I think that they [spy agencies] have electronic intelligence, and that they have done a full inventory of who has provided access to that lab. I think they have very compelling evidence. And there have also been defectors," he said. "People around these labs have been leaving China and Hong Kong since mid-February. [US intelligence] along with MI5 and MI6 are trying to build a very thorough legal case, which may take a long time. It’s not like James Bond."

Mr Bannon even suggested that the French government, which helped to build the institute, had left behind monitoring systems after Beijing shut them out of the project before it opened in 2017. -Daily Mail

"The thing was built with French help, so don’t think that there aren’t some monitoring devices in there. I think what you are going to find out is that these guys were doing experiments which they weren’t fully authorized [for] or knew what they were doing and that somehow, either through an inadvertent mistake, or on a lab technician, one of these things got out," Bannon continued. "It’s not that hard for these viruses to get out. That is why these labs are so dangerous."

"You essentially had a biological Chernobyl in Wuhan, but the center of gravity, the Ground Zero, was around the Wuhan lab, in terms of the casualty rates. And like Chernobyl, you also had the cover-up – the state apparatus reports to itself and just protects itself."

Mr Bannon, who has close links to Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire, told this newspaper: ‘Regardless of whether it came out of the market or the Wuhan lab, the Chinese Communist party’s subsequent decisions hold them guilty of pre-meditated murder.

‘We know this because Taiwan formally informed the WHO on December 31 that there was some sort of epidemic coming out of Hubei province [where Wuhan is]. The CDC in Beijing was informed on January 2 or 3, and they decided to withhold that information and then sign a trade deal [with the US on January 15].

‘If they had been straightforward and truthful in the last week of December, 95 per cent of the lives lost and the economic carnage would have been contained. -Daily Mail

Bannon continues:

"That is the tragedy here. They used the time to scoop up all the world’s personal protective equipment. This is a murderous dictatorship. The blood is [also] on the hands of the world’s corporations – the investment banks, the hedge funds and the pension funds – and it is time to start calling it out before it leads to the destruction of the West," Bannon elaborated. "We are in the most extraordinary crisis in modern American history, more than Vietnam, the Cold War, even the Second World War. A global pandemic and an economic inferno. I have no faith in the WHO, the leadership should face criminal charges and be shut down."

One has to wonder if China will respond with whistleblowers from Ft. Detrick to support their narrative?

The Truth Behind The Mask

Swiss Mountain Vault Offers Wealthy Elites $500,000 Plots For Storing Valuables

From Zero Hedge:

With world trade collapsed, socio-economic chaos has unfolded across the Western world as central bank money printing and massive fiscal injections by governments might not be enough to ward off the next round of economic declines. 

The virus pandemic and social unrest in the US has shown just how fragile everything is - as wealthy elites flee metro areas for rural communities. We've shown those with economic mobility, considering the virus-induced recession has crushed tens of millions of folks into financial ruin - are buying underground bunkers so if Western economies plunge deeper into chaos -  they will be protected, from social unrest and or nuclear war with China. 

The wealthy have been the primary asset gathers in the last decade, thanks to central bank policies that has decimated the bottom 90% of Americans, stripped of assets, hence the record wealth inequality - and maybe another reason why people are protesting. 

Now, these wealthy folks have to figure out where they can safely store their post-war Ferraris, expensive artwork, rare wine collections, precious metals, and anything else of value. 

Bloomberg might have found that place, located in Switzerland, where a company is set to embark on a project to build deep underground vaults within a mountain. 

The Brünig Mega Safe Project, the firm heading up the project to build underground vaults in the Swiss Alps, said on its website, "Your treasure chamber in a solid rock massif," adding that, "The secure place for safekeeping your assets and sensitive data."

The vault is expected to be absolutely massive - equivalent to about ten soccer fields, according to board member Hugo Schittenhelm. He said the underground space could "multiply" if needed.

"The Swiss vaults will range from 100 cubic meters (3,531 cubic feet) to 1,000 times that large with heights of up to 90 meters, according to the website. The rock walls ensure a constant relative humidity of 40% and a temperature of 12 degrees Celsius (53.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Prices start at $500,000 and go up from there," said Bloomberg. 

Brünig Mega Safe will be constructed by engineering and underground construction firm, Gasser Felstechnik AG. 

Already, the project has attracted potential clients, including family offices, corporations, art galleries, and high net worth individuals, said Schittenhelm. 

Bloomberg notes the project needs $7.5 million to begin construction, expecting work to start as early as next year - the first vaults are expected to be commercially available 18 months from construction start.

With no V-shaped recovery in the global economy this year - turmoil is expected to last for the next several years as social fabric unravelings will continue in many Western countries, more specifically, in the US - it now might make sense for wealthy folks to start storing valuables in rock valuts before the social-economic implosion worsens. 

Atheism And Luciferianism Dismantled

Chinese Banks Preparing For "Worst Case" Scenario: Being Cut Off From SWIFT, Hong Kong Bank Runs

From Zero Hedge:

In the latest escalation over China's de facto annexation of Hong Kong, Reuters reports that Chinese state lenders are "revamping contingency plans" in anticipation of the soon to be enacted U.S. legislation (just waiting for Trump's signature) that would penalize banks for serving officials who implement the new national security law for Hong Kong.

In a "worst-case scenario" under consideration by Chinese commercial megabanks Bank of China and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the lenders are said to be looking at the possibility of being cut off from U.S. dollars or losing access to U.S. dollar settlements, two Reuters sources said.

The worst-case scenario also envisions what would happen in the event of a run on its branches in Hong Kong if customers feared that it would run out of U.S. currency, one of the sources said (this is the scenario discussed in "If 500,000 Rich Hong Kongers Leave The City, The HKD Peg Would Surely Collapse"). The scenario was also looking at the experience of banks in Iran, the same person said. Iranian banks have been hit from time to time by U.S. sanctions dating back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

"We are hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. You never know how things will turn out," one of the sources said.

In a milder scenario being looked at by the Agricultural Bank of China (AgBank), lenders would need to find ways to address the problem of clients blacklisted by the United States, especially those who might face a sudden loss of liquidity.

As Reuters adds, the contingency planning has been initiated by the banks themselves, who have the most to lose should the US effectively trigger a massive dollar bank run.

As Reuters calculates, Bank of China, the country's most international lender, had the biggest exposure of the country's big four lenders to the greenback at the end of 2019, with about $433 billion in liabilities. China's top four banks, which also include ICBC, China Construction Bank and AgBank, had a combined 7.5 trillion yuan ($1 trillion) in U.S. dollar liabilities at the end of 2019, annual reports show.

According to the report, at least three state-run leasing firms, including an ICBC unit and CSIC Leasing, are also making contingency plans. Leasing firms are often heavily reliant on dollar borrowing to fund purchases of aircraft, machinery and facilities.

China's contingency plans are in response to the unanimous passage in the House and Senate of a bill last week which seeks to impose financial sanctions on Chinese banks in response to the National Security Law. It has yet to be signed into law by President Donald Trump. The bill calls for sanctions on Chinese officials and others who help violate Hong Kong's autonomy and on financial institutions that do business with them. But it does not spell out what the sanctions would look like.

"There are sanctions in this bill which could be interpreted to prevent a bank from clearing some dollar transactions via U.S. institutions, but unlike other congressional sanctions bills there are not specific provisions mandating it," said Nick Turner, a lawyer specialising in sanctions and anti-money laundering at Steptoe & Johnson in Hong Kong.

Aside from its contingency planning, China has said it would "launch a counterattack against US hegemony" if Trump was to block access of Chinese banks to dollar funding and the SWIFT payment system

SGH Macro have noted that countermeasures from China could include a speeding up of the use of the Renminbi for China’s own parallel Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), a surge in issuance of RMB denominated loans to Belt and Road Initiative countries, a push for greater RMB use through the Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE) crude oil futures, and an acceleration of the implementation of China’s Digital Currency Electronics Payment (DCEP), the first digital currency issued by a central bank.