"Probably nothing..."
This morning's disappointing inflation and retail sales data (hard data) more than offset any gains in the soft data (modest rise in UMich confidence), crashing Citi's US Macro Surprise Index to its weakest (and most negative) level since May 2016...
What happens next?
With futures looking ominously ungreen this morning, what better way to prop them up than to upgrade the stock that alone has contributed to 13% of the S&P's return YTD...
... Apple.
That'sprecisely what both BofA and Goldman have done this morning, with the former raising its 12-month price target to $170 from $164, "based on a target P/E of 15x (unchanged) and our CY18 EPS estimate of $11.38 (up from $10.91)."
On the day when Snapchat erased billions of market cap from investors (and founders) accounts - as the MAUs-means-money model seems to break - we thought it worthwhile taking another glimpse into the hush-hush world of 'click-farms' and the fakeness of the latest social network fads.
There are two things in which Elon Musk is an undisputed champion: creating hype and buzz for massively cash-flow burning products and companies, and abusing every possible loophole in the US tax code to get explicit and implicit subsidies from the government. He demonstrated the latter on Wednesday, when Tesla began taking orders for its solar roof tiles, a cornerstone strategy of Elon Musk's strategy to sell a "green", fossil-fuel-free lifestyle under the brand name of its luxury electric vehicles.
Background.
The Sun claims that CNN has released new footage of last month’s Syrian chemical incident … and strongly implies that the Syrian government was responsible.
Washington’s Blog asked MIT rocket scientist and chemical weapons expert Theodore Postol* what he thought of the footage.
Postol replied:
I agree that the footage is harrowing. However none of it is new and none of it proves that the Syrian government was the perpetrator of a nerve agent attack.