Several months ago, right after the last Academy Awards, I posted a long, long, long list of possible contenders that had prospects to fight for the next Oscars. It was a time of hope, of looking forward, and of positivity. Then, COVID-19 happened. And now, we find ourselves in a year that may change the movie industry forever, with the lack of safety of theaters in times of a pandemic accelerating the switch of mainstream audiences to streaming and VOD. These are times where some people are beginning to wonder, even after they pushed the eligibility date for two more months, why the Academy doesn’t cancel next year’s Oscars. And in this rocky terrain, we lost many contenders. Fire up the Hunger Games cannons, because these are some casualties of the season (so far). Launched to 2021: Annette, Benedetta, Deep Water, Dune, In the Heights, King Richard, Last Night in Soho, Memoria, Nightmare Alley, Passing, Red, White and Water, Raya and the Last Dragon, The Last Duel, The Power of the Dog, Tick, Tick… Boom!, West Side Story. Unknown status / missing in action: After Yang, Blonde, Breaking News in Yuba County, C’mon C’mon, Next Goal Wins, Stillwater, The French Dispatch, The Humans, The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Those Who Wish Me Dead. But even if this year isn’t as loaded with clear awards candidates, there are plenty of movies that are already drawing buzz for an Oscar season that started brewing a month ago, with the kickoff of the Venice Film Festival, and will go on for six and a half more months, when the Academy Awards take place on April 25, 2021. It’s gonna be a long, weird and rocky season, which is gonna be great to see in terms of the narratives that are coming up. -Ammonite (trailer): When people were betting on the likelier contenders of this year, many people pointed in the direction of Francis Lee’s period drama, with previous Best Actress winner Kate Winslet and constant nominee Saoirse Ronan. Going into the premiere at Toronto, people had their eyes set in this queer romance between a paleontologist and a young wife in the coasts of England during the 19th century. But then, some things happened. First, Winslet started her promotion of the movie by talking about her regret for working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski that sounded unconvincing to the ominous Film Twitter. Then, another queer period drama, Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come, started to take the attention away at Venice. And finally, the movie premiered. The reaction? Cold. Critics came out mixed with the movie, with many of them comparing it negatively to last year’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and saying that it’s too dull and alienating. Does that mean that all is lost? Not exactly. While the movie (which, considering the genre, really needs critics' support to get into the Best Picture category) has been dismissed, the acting by Winslet and Ronan has been received positively. Now that so many other contenders have been dropping out of the year, they might get some room to campaign from a (social) distance. -Another Round (trailer): Speaking of TIFF premieres, a film that had a better time at the Canadian festival was the reunion between director Thomas Vinterberg and star Mads Mikkelsen, who reunited years after making the stirring drama The Hunt (not the one with Betty Gilpin carrying a bad political satire, the one about a Danish teacher wrongly accused of sexual abuse). This time, the material is lighter, being a dramedy about four teachers who decide to test out a theory about how people can live and work a little better if they increase the level of alcohol in their blood. Critics really liked the way the movie dealt with alcoholism, and Toronto audiences made it a runner up for the People’s Choice Award of the festival. In a year without so much exposure from other festivals, this Cannes 2020 selection could make a candidate for the Best International Film category. -Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (trailer): Surprise, new Borat film! While Sacha Baron Cohen made headlines several times this year because of stunts that people assumed were about a second season of Who is America?, the Internet was shocked when, in early September, it was confirmed that it was actually a very niiiiice return from the journalist character that made him famous, shot during quarantine. In a matter of weeks after the reveal, the sequel got sold to Amazon Prime and got a release date for October 23. Why so soon? Well, apparently the movie, which got him in trouble with Rudy Giuliani and other people, is about Borat taking his daughter on a road trip to give her as a bride to VP Mike Pence. Even if this movie doesn’t manage to achieve the feats of the 2006 movie (which got a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination, let’s remember), it will help Baron Cohen’s image a lot, because it will come a week after his big Oscar play. -Cherry: While everybody knows them mostly because of their contributions to the MCU, directors Joe and Anthony Russo and actor Tom Holland are trying to branch out together. Now Apple has bought into their efforts, paying more than 40 million dollars to acquire their new crime drama, about the life of former Army medic Nico Walker, who started robbing banks after his days in Iraq left him with PTSD and a pill addiction. Will Holland manage this time to escape from the shadow of “oh, jeez, Mr. Stark” Spider-Man before Chaos Walking or the Uncharted movie come out? That’s a question for another day. -Da 5 Bloods (trailer): Talk about timing. Merely days after the country was mobilized by the police brutality that continues to divide the United States, Spike Lee premiered his new war drama on Netflix. In a vibrant, disjointed but passionate portrait of four African American veterans who return to Vietnam to search for their fallen leader and some treasure, Lee struck gold yet again with his usual fans, even though the moving of the Oscar ceremony threatened to make it harder to remind Academy voters about this movie. However, with an astounding performance from Delroy Lindo (who is confirmed to be campaigned in the Best Actor category) and a supporting turn from Chadwick Boseman which got reframed with the news of his bravery in life and death, this has what it takes to fight for a spot in the Best Picture lineup. -Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (trailer): When it became clear that quarantine wasn’t gonna be a breeze, the first movie in consideration wise enough to move a little further ahead in the calendar was this adaptation of the hit West End production about a gay British teenager who dreams of becoming a drag queen and get his family and schoolmates to accept his sexuality. With a release date on February 26, 20th Century Studios (man, it’s weird to not use Fox in that name) hopes to strike gold, with a cast that mixes young unknowns, familiar names (Sharon Horgan, Sarah Lancashire and my boy Ralph Ineson) and the previously nominated legend that is Richard E. Grant (who is playing a former drag queen named Loco Chanelle), now taking advantage of the move of other musicals like Annette, In The Heights and West Side Story. I mean, this has at the very least some Golden Globes nods in the bag. -French Exit: Before its premiere as the closing film of the NYFF, many pundits were expecting this surreal comedy to be somewhat of a comeback for past Best Actress nominee Michelle Pfeiffer, who here plays a close to penniless widow who moves to Paris with her son (Lucas Hedges) and cat, who also happens to be her reincarnated husband (Tracy Letts). However, the first reactions for the film adaptation of the Patrick deWitt novel were all over the place, with some people feeling cold by the execution of the weirdness and others being won over. Still, everybody had good things to say about Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance, but after the mixed reception to the rest of Azazel Jacobs’ film she really would need a lot of critics support to get anywhere near the Best Actress category. With a release date on February 12, it seems that Sony Pictures Classics is skipping the critics awards, and the distributor has a couple of big competitors above this one. -Good Joe Bell: Every year, there are movies with big stars that go to festivals full of hope for praises and awards. Some of them work and go on, others don’t and get forgotten about. Mark Wahlberg tried to remind people that he occasionally is a good actor with a true life drama where he plays a father who decides to walk across America to raise awareness about bullying after his son, tormented for being gay, commits suicide. The film by Reinaldo Marcus Green premiered at TIFF, and the reaction was… not great. Some critics defended it, but most saw it as a flawed, baity product starring a man with a history of hate. Still, it got bought by a distributor: Solstice Studios, a new player in the game which just released its first movie, Unhinged (yup, the one about Russell Crowe road raging). While they paid 20 million dollars for Good Joe Bell, it’s clear that this won’t get near the Oscar telecast. -Hillbilly Elegy: While many movies this year have some level of anticipation, Film Twitter is bracing for this movie in the “is this gonna be the next Green Book?” way. Ron Howard’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s memoir about his low income life in a poor rural community in Ohio has many fearing about the overuse of tropes involving what’s called white trash porn, but rarely, Netflix has kept silent about this release. Even though it has Oscar bridesmaids Glenn Close (7 nominations) and Amy Adams (6 nominations), the streamer has not even released a photo of the movie, which supposedly will come out in November. And if you want another bad omen, take a look at the lower levels of this list by a familiar voice. -I’m Thinking of Ending Things (trailer): Speaking of Netflix, did you know that there is a new Charlie Kaufman there, right now? While his adaptation of the dark novel by Iain Reid, seemingly about a woman (Jessie Buckley) who is taken by her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to meet his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis), got the usual reception of confusion and praise that follows his movies, the release was followed for what befalls most of the Netflix original movies: a couple of days in the Top 10, and then it fell into the void. While Buckley and Plemons deliver great work in this demented, melancholic story, it’s hard to see this movie getting anything else than a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Charlie. And that’s a long shot. -I’m Your Woman: Following the little seen but critically acclaimed Miss Stevens and Fast Color, Julia Hart started 2020 with a Disney+ adaptation of the YA book Stargirl, and now she follows it with a drama for Amazon that will have its world premiere as the opening film of the AFI fest on October 15. In this movie, Rachel Brosnahan hopes to translate her TV success with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to the big screen, playing a woman in the ‘70s that has to go on the run with her kid due to her husband’s crimes. -Judas and the Black Messiah (trailer): Even if this doesn’t end up winning any awards, it has a real shot at being the best trailer of 2020. Formerly titled Jesus Was My Homeboy, this biographical drama by Shaka King tells the tale of two men: Fred Hampton (Kaluuya), an activist and Black Panther leader, and William O’Neal (Stanfield), the FBI agent sent to infiltrate the party and arrest him. While the trailer for this movie promised a release “only in theaters”, we shall see if Warner Bros backs down from that fight. -Let Them All Talk: While we’re on the subject of Warner Bros, we have to mention what’s happening with HBO Max. While the start of the streaming service hasn’t been good (I mean, there are still people confused about that name) and it lead to some people assume will cause many firings, it has begun to make some buzzed titles on TV, like Close Enough, Raised by Wolves and the remains of the DC Universe failed streaming service. Now, to make a mark in the movie business, the streamer has a new Steven Soderbergh movie, a comedy that stars Meryl Streep as a celebrated author that takes her friends (Candice Bergen, Dianne Wiest) and her nephew (Lucas Hedges) in a cruise to find fun and come to terms with the past, while he flirts with a literary agent (Gemma Chan). While it doesn’t have a date yet, it’s confirmed to release in 2020, and at least we know that it can’t be worse than The Laundromat. -Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: While the expectations for the next film adaptation of an August Wilson acclaimed play were already high, the tragic death of Chadwick Boseman made this Netflix release one of the most anticipated movies of the season, considering this is his final movie. While past Supporting Actress winner Viola Davis takes the lead playing blues singer Ma Rainey in this tale of a heated recording session with her bandmates, her agent and her producer in 1927, Chadwick Boseman has a turn as the trumpeter Levee that was already being considered for awards, and now has even more people waiting to see. The thing is that one of the biggest competitions for Boseman this year will be Boseman himself, for his already acclaimed supporting turn on Da 5 Bloods, also released by Netflix. While the streamer will have to decide which of Chadwick’s performances will get the bigger campaign, this film by director George C. Wolfe has a cushy date set for December 18, and Viola is gunning hard for this movie to win. -Mank (trailer): As you may have noticed by now, Netflix has a lot of plates spinning around this season, and this is the big one. After befriending the service with House of Cards and Mindhunter, David Fincher is going black and white to tackle a script by his late father Jack, about the making of the classic of classics, Citizen Kane. More specifically, the making of the script, with previous Oscar winner Gary Oldman playing the lead role of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, while accompanied by Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Tuppence Middleton, Charles Dance and Tom Burke. After watching the first trailer of his satire of 1930’s Hollywood (that will release on streaming on December 4), it’s clear that this is gonna be catnip to old Academy voters, and it would be really hard for this to miss the Best Picture line up. Unless it’s a complete cinematic disaster, Mank is bank. -Minari (trailer): While the last edition of Sundance took place in January, quarantine makes you feel like it took place two years ago. This year, the big winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award in the US Dramatic Competition was a dramedy by Lee Isaac Chung, about a Korean family in the ‘80s who suddenly gets moved by their father (Steven Yeun) to Arkansas, to start a farm. Even though the reviews have been great, distributor A24 hasn’t really had a big, Oscar nominated hit for the last couple of years, and the COVID-19 crisis made them delay all their releases. But when we were ready to write this off, a new trailer for the movie came out, confirming that it’s in the game of this awards season. Maybe the pandemic will be of help to A24, considering that one of the reasons they haven’t had success is that they divided their attention into too many releases, and ended up getting not much. This time, they are betting all on Lee who, even if this doesn’t go anywhere, also has a new gig coming up as the director of the live action remake of Your Name. -News of the World (sneak peek): So much of this year has felt like a game of chicken between a virus and movie studios. While many movies chose to skip this year altogether, Universal remains firm (for now) with its plans to open a wide movie on Christmas Day, with a Western that reunites Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks in an enticing premise. In this drama based on Paulette Jiles’ novel, Hanks plays a traveling newsreader in the aftermath of the American Civil War, who is tasked with reuniting an orphaned girl with her living relatives. While the first sneak peek of the movie looks promising, the future is still in the air. -Nomadland (trailer): While the world burns around Hollywood, Searchlight is betting big on Chloe Zhao’s new film. Using the strategy of taking the spotlight while the rest of the contenders is uncertain about how or when to be released, the indie drama began its journey at Venice, with critics raving about the story of a woman (two-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand) who, after losing everything in the Great Recession, embarks on a journey through the American West, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad. At the end of the fest, the movie won the coveted Golden Lion. To put that into perspective, the last three winners of the award were past Best Picture nominees The Shape of Water, Roma and Joker, with The Shape of Water (also distributed by Searchlight) also winning the big prize. After drawing critical acclaim following its virtual showing on TIFF and NYFF, Nomadland seems like the first lock in the Best Picture line up. Still, there are obstacles ahead. Will Zhao break the disappointment of the last few years, when deserving candidates for Best Director got blocked by the likes of Adam McKay and Todd Phillips? And will McDormand manage to get near a third Oscar, following a recent win for Three Billboards in Ebbing, Missouri? Time will tell. -On the Rocks (trailer): While she hasn’t been near the Oscars for a while, Sofia Coppola is still a name that draws attention. This time, she opened the NYFF with a dramedy about a young mother (Rashida Jones) who reunites with her playboy father (Bill Murray, also reuniting with Sofia after Lost in Translation) on an adventure through New York to find out if her husband (Marlon Wayans) is cheating on her. The consensus seems to be that, while light and not near her best work, it’s still a fun and breezy movie, with a very good turn by Murray. While many would assume that this A24 production will disappear into the abyss when it releases on Apple TV+ on October 23, the dropping out of many candidates gives the movie a chance to, at least, fight for some Golden Globes. -One Night in Miami (sneak peek): Following her recent Oscar and Emmy wins for If Beale Street Could Talk and Watchmen, Regina King is still striking hard, and this time, she’s doing it as a director. For her big screen debut as a filmmaker, she chose to adapt Kemp Powers’ play that dramatizes a real meeting on February 25, 1964, when Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree) followed an iconic win with a hangout session with Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge). Opening at Venice, the film received glowing reviews, with many praising King (even though some said that the movie doesn’t fully translate the play to the film medium) and the actors’ performances, especially Ben-Adir and Odom Jr. (who, it should be said, also wrote an original song for the end credits of the movie, which could help his Oscar chances). Amazon Prime is hoping that this is their big contender this year, with plans of a theatrical release on Christmas and a streaming release on January 15. Judging by the praise this got at festival season, it has a chance to go a long way. -Over the Moon (trailer): In a year with not that many contenders for Best Animated Feature, Netflix is betting on a musical adventure directed by the legendary Glen Keane, a classic Disney animator who recently won an Oscar for Best Animated Short for co-directing Dear Basketball. While our expectations were lowered by the first trailer for the movie, centered around a Chinese girl who builds a rocket ship and blasts off to the Moon in hopes of meeting a legendary Goddess, it’s still safe to assume that it has a shot at being nominated for something. Netflix also hopes that you like its big candidate for Best Original Song, which really, really sounds like a Disney ballad. -Pieces of a Woman: While this year doesn’t have the amount of surprise contenders that a regular Oscar season usually has, we still have some movies that sneaked through festival season. The first one was the new, somber drama by Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó, known for the doggy uprising pic White God, and the not-so-well-received sci-fi Jupiter’s Moon. This time, we follow a woman (Vanessa Kirby) whose life is torn apart after a home birth at the hands of a flustered midwife (Molly Parker) ends in tragedy, and then leads to a court battle that also makes her confront her husband (Shia LaBeouf) and her domineering mother (Ellen Burstyn). While the movie had mixed reactions, Kirby had plenty of raves in her direction, particularly concerning her performance during a 25-minute birth sequence that is said to be brutal. That brutality paid off, though, because Kirby ended up winning Best Actress at Venice, and Netflix bought the movie, which also has Martin Scorsese as an executive producer. If the Academy wants to crown a new face in the scene, Kirby is the one who will be targeted, following her acclaimed turn in The Crown and her supporting roles in blockbusters like Mission Impossible: Fallout and Hobbs & Shaw. -Promising Young Woman (trailer): When theaters started to close because of the pandemic, Universal started the push of their movies going straight to VOD, with titles including Trolls World Tour and Never Rarely Sometimes Always. However, there was a title that was supposed to premiere in April, and then suddenly disappeared from existence. It was the directorial debut of actress Emerald Fennell, who wrote a black comedy with touches of a thriller, centered on a woman in her thirties (Carey Mulligan) whose bright future was derailed by a traumatic event, and who’s now looking for revenge. While the reaction to its premiere at Sundance wasn’t enough to consider a Best Picture run, the twisted performance by Mulligan earned her the best praise since the last time she was nominated for an Oscar, a decade ago for An Education. Now, Focus Features is planning to open the movie at Christmas, and are positioning Carey for a run at Best Actress. -Rebecca (trailer): When the news came out saying that Ben Wheatley would adapt Daphne du Maurier’s psychological thriller novel for Netflix, many were shocked. Some people considered the chance that this was an awards play by the cult director, who is doing the same work that earned Alfred Hitchcock his only Best Picture win. But seeing the trailer for this new version, with Lily James playing the newly married young woman who finds herself battling the shadow of her husband's (Armie Hammer) dead first wife Rebecca, we have to wonder if there’s a point to the existence of this remake. We will find out if there’s any awards chances for this movie on October 21, when it releases on streaming. Let’s hope that Kristin Scott Thomas has something to play with as Mrs. Danvers. -Respect (trailer): Every year, there’s one or two actors who announce to the world “I want an Oscar” and campaign like their lives depended on it. Last time, it was Taron Egerton (accompanied by Elton John, who actually ended up winning another Oscar). This year, it is the turn of Jennifer Hudson, who is playing Aretha Franklin in a biopic directed by first timer Liesl Tommy, and who’s hoping that this attempt at awards ends up more like Dreamgirls than like Cats. She has been doing announcement trailers (a year in advance), quarantine tributes, award show tributes, and every possible thing to get the industry to notice that she’s playing Aretha. Hey, Rami Malek and Renee Zellweger did it in the last few years, why can’t she. With a release date of January 15, Hudson wants that gold. -Soul (trailer): Disney may be the studio that suffered the biggest hit because of the pandemic. Their parks are a loss, most of their big productions had to stop because of quarantine, and theaters in many parts of the world are closed. After the failure of Tenet for Warner Bros. and the experiment of the mouse house of charging people 30 dollars to see Mulan (which didn’t work at all), many wondered if Disney was gonna delay the new production by Pixar, written and directed by Pete Docter, who brought Oscar gold to his home with Up and Inside Out. The movie, which centers on a teacher (Jamie Foxx) who dreams of becoming a jazz musician and, just as he’s about to get his big break, ends up getting into an accident that separates his soul from his body, had a lot of promise, but the speculation of lost money was also a concern. Finally, Disney decided to release the movie on Christmas, but only on Disney Plus, causing another failure for theaters, but assuring that Disney at least can get more subscribers to its streaming service. And the movie? Well, it just premiered at the London Film Festival, and the critics are saying it’s Pixar at its best, with praises going from the look, to the script by co-director Kemp Powers (who also wrote the play of One Night in Miami, so he has many chances for a nod), to the score by Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and Jon Batiste. That means that it’s already a top contender to win Best Animated Feature, and this may not be the only category in which the movie is gonna get nominated. -Supernova (trailer): If there’s a theme this year in terms of Oscar contenders, it might be dementia. One of the examples of this is a small road movie directed by Hairy Macqueen, which premiered to good reviews at the San Sebastian festival. This drama centers on a trip taken by Sam (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci), partners for 20 years, who travel across England reuniting with friends and family, because Tusker was diagnosed with early onset dementia. While usually the big awards role is usually the one of the person who suffers the illnesses, some reviewers are calling Firth’s work as the supporting companion some of the best of his career. With Bleecker Street buying the rights for a US release, this is a little film that could still make some moves. -Tenet (trailer): For the first five months of quarantine, the big narrative in the world of film was “Christopher Nolan is gonna save cinemas”. But after postponing the release of the mind bending actioner for months on end, creating big demands and expectations to theater owners, and finally releasing as the sacrificial lamb of Hollywood, Warner Bros ended up seeing the opposite effect. Even though Tom Cruise loved to be back at the movies, critics didn’t share enough excitement to make a spy movie that goes backwards worth the possibility of dying of coronavirus. The audiences didn’t show up as much, and those who did attend, mostly complained about the sound mixing and the plot. After all the sacrifice, it’s highly unlikely that Tenet goes beyond technical awards. Let’s start the “Travis Scott for Best Original Song” campaign now, before it’s too late. -The Boys in the Band (trailer): The Ryan Murphy blank check for Netflix has been interesting to follow. On the one hand, we have his new TV shows, which go from not existing (The Politician), to alternate movie history that doesn’t know how alternate history works (Hollywood), to a challenge of how much TV will you stomach if Sarah Paulson and other middle aged actresses are campy in it (Ratched). And now, we are seeing his producing hand over the movie side, which starts with the new film adaptation of the cult play from 1968, which was already a movie in 1970 and recently jumped to Broadway in 2018. The cast from the recent Broadway production (which includes Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer and Andrew Rannells) stars in Joe Mantello’s movie, telling the story of a group of gay friends in pre-Stonewall New York who reunite for a birthday party and end up revealing a lot of open wounds. While this movie got good reviews from critics, it kinda disappeared without a sound after beginning to stream on Netflix at the end of September. Unless the service wants to campaign for Golden Globes, this film is lost in the algorithm. -The Devil All the Time (trailer): Another September release on Netflix was the new psychological thriller by Antonio Campos (Simon Killer, Christine) who didn’t manage to continue his streak of intense and terrifying character dramas with his messy adaptation of the dark novel by Donald Ray Pollock. Wasting a cast that includes Tom Holland, Sebastian Stan, Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, Eliza Scanlen, Bill Skarsgard, Jason Clarke and Riley Keough, this twisted period piece managed to stay for a while in the Top 10, but the reactions from critics were mixed, and audiences were busy asking what was happening with Pattinson’s Southern accent (which with The King makes two years in a row, baby). The many prognosticators who had hopes for an awards play moved on a while ago. -The Father (trailer): It’s safe to say at this point that Anthony Hopkins is a lock for a Best Actor nomination at the next Oscars. After its premiere in Sundance, every prognosticator pointed in his direction, and for the next few months he swept praise for his harrowing portrayal of an old man grappling with his age as he develops dementia, causing pain to his beleaguered daughter (recent winner Olivia Colman, who also got praised). Sony Pictures Classics will make Florian Zeller’s adaptation of his acclaimed play its big contender of the season, using Hopkins (who this year got a nom for The Two Popes) as a starter to also get Colman, Zeller and the movie nominated. -The Human Voice (trailer): And speaking of Sony Pictures Classics, it’s almost safe to say that they have another Oscar in the bag this year. That’s because they just bought Pedro Almodóvar’s short film, his English-speaking debut that is an adaptation of the play by Jean Cocteau. In his version (that was acclaimed by critics after premiering in Venice), Tilda Swinton plays the woman waiting at the end of a phone, expecting to hear from his ex-lover who abandoned her. Considering how the competition for Best Live Action Short Film has become somewhat lacking in the last few years (I mean, have you seen Skin), this should be an easy award to win, especially considering how beloved Almodóvar is in the Academy, which nominated him this year for the great Pain and Glory. -The Life Ahead: While we’re talking about legends, it’s time to talk about Sophia Loren. 16 years after her last leading role in a movie, the Italian icon returns with a drama that was bought by Netflix, who plans to campaign for her as Best Actress and for the movie in the Best International Film category. Directed by Edoardo Ponti (who is also Sophia’s son), this movie centers on a Holocaust survivor who takes in a 12-year-old boy who recently robbed her, in a contemporary adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel The Life Before Us. Netflix has set a date for November 13 to release this movie, and the campaign seems to be about the narrative of seeing Loren winning another Oscar 60 years after she won her first one for Two Women, by Vittorio De Sica. -The Midnight Sky: Based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight, this collaboration between George Clooney and Netflix is once again making us ask one thing. Are we gonna get the director Clooney of Good Night and Good Luck, or are we gonna get the director Clooney of Leatherheads, The Ides of March, The Monuments Men and Suburbicon? Let’s hope he breaks his streak of blandness with this sci-fi story, which makes us think a little bit of Gravity: A lonely scientist in the Arctic (Clooney) races to stop a group of astronauts led by Felicity Jones from returning to a devastated Earth. With a release set for December, we have to hope that this is more than some Top 10 filler that will evaporate from existence in a week’s time. -The Prom: In probably the biggest blank check of the Ryan Murphy deal with Netflix, this musical he’ll direct is based on the Tony-nominated show about a group of Broadway losers (Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Andrew Rannells and James “boo” Corden) who try to find a viral story to get back in the spotlight, and end up going to a town in Indiana to help a lesbian high school student who has been banned from bringing her girlfriend to the prom. While it’s clear that this December 11 release is gonna sweep the Golden Globes, the emptiness of this year compared to others could clear the way for some Oscar nominations, including Meryl and the obligatory original song added to a preexisting musical for easy clout. -The Trial of the Chicago 7 (trailer): When it was announced that Paramount was selling Aaron Sorkin’s new movie to Netflix, some people saw it as a studio dumping a failed awards vehicle to be forgotten. However, the excuse that Sorkin wanted to release this movie before the US presidential elections seems to be true, because critics really enjoyed his old school courtroom drama, centered around the trial on counter cultural activists in the late ‘60s. Everybody praised uniformly the huge cast, that includes Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jeremy Strong, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Frank Langella, William Hurt, Michael Keaton and Mark Rylance, which guarantees a SAG awards nomination (but makes it difficult to decide which actors will actually get nominated for Oscars). With a reaction that brings to mind the days of A Few Good Men and is the best reception he got since his Oscar winning script for The Social Network, the film faces a couple of hurdles. First of all, it got positioned as the frontrunner in the Best Picture race by some people, which instantly puts a target on its back. Then, we have to consider that the movie releases on Netflix this Friday, October 16, which makes it the first big contender this year to face the world, and which in these times of lockdown will probably make the reception to Marriage Story and The Irishman from last year look like a walk in the park. I mean, there are some people who aren’t swayed by Sorkin, and for good reason. -The United States vs. Billie Holiday: While Paramount was quick to hand The Trial of the Chicago 7 to Netflix, there’s another movie that the studio kept to play in the upcoming awards season. This biographical drama follows the life of another famous musician, Billie Holiday (Andra Day), and we see the journey of her career in jazz as she is targeted by the Federal Department of Narcotics with an undercover sting operation led by Federal Agent Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), with whom she had a tumultuous affair. While the movie counts with a screenplay credit by Pulitzer winner Suzan-Lori Parks, the big question mark is the film’s director, Lee Daniels, who hit it big with Precious and then had results that were disastrous (The Paperboy) or financially successful, but not awards-wise (Lee Daniels’ The Butler). However, Paramount trusts in this movie, and with a release date on February 12, they want to make a splash. -Wolfwalkers (trailer): While the attempts by Apple TV+ to establish themselves as a player in the TV world go from trainwrecks (See) to forgettable (The Morning Show) to eventually great (see Ted Lasso, everybody, this is not a joke), their plans to make a name in the film business have something to do with this year’s Oscars. While Cherry can come or go, they have a solid contender for the Best Feature Documentary with Boys State, but their big dog this year is the new movie by Cartoon Saloon, an Irish studio responsible for the acclaimed The Secret of Kells, The Song of the Sea, and The Breadwinner, all of which were nominated for Best Animated Feature. This time, Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart direct a story about a young apprentice hunter who journeys with her father to Ireland to help wipe out the last wolf pack. But everything changes when she befriends a free-spirited girl from a mysterious tribe rumored to transform into wolves by night. After getting critically acclaimed following its premiere at TIFF, this is a surefire contender for this year’s Best Animated Feature category, and Apple is gonna parade it before its streaming release on December 11. Also, while you watch that, you could watch a couple of episodes of Ted Lasso, too. It’s a really good show, it’s all I’m saying. Anyways, that’s all the news from the last few months of festivals. No matter what happens next, this is gonna be a long, long, long race.
Equity bulls believe everything is fine. The bond markets know better
Global bond markets refuse to ratify a V-shaped economic recovery. Futures contracts in fixed income derivatives are even more bearish, signalling nothing less than a worldwide deflationary slump as far as the eye can see. "If markets are pricing a 'V', they're going about it in an odd way," says Andrew Sheets from Morgan Stanley. It is simply not true that investors are ignoring the massive economic shock of the pandemic. The picture is being distorted by equities, and within that by a clutch of US tech stocks in the grip of a parabolic spike all too like the final phase of the dotcom bubble in 2000. But debt markets are three times bigger and ultimately matter far more. Yields on 10-year US Treasuries have not rebounded as you would expect if the economy is genuinely healing. They are trading at 0.62 per cent, close to their all-time low during the panic flight to safety in late March. You can perhaps rationalise such low yields on the grounds that the Federal Reserve has repressed the Treasury market with its $US3 trillion ($4.3 trillion) blast of pandemic QE, although be aware that the Fed balance sheet peaked at $US7.2 trillion in early June and has since fallen by $US200 billion. What you cannot so easily rationalise is the long-range pricing of futures contracts. They imply that yields will remain pinned to the floor until the mid-2030s and that the Fed will not come close to meeting its inflation target by the middle of the century. Fixed income funds are telling us central banks will fail to generate more than a flicker of inflation despite heroic efforts. It is the portrait of a truncated recovery with corrosively high unemployment. Swathes of the US stock market remain in distress. David Rosenberg, from Rosenberg Research & Associates, says the sectoral tally is: auto stocks (minus 23 per cent), advertising (minus 34 per cent), energy and regional banks (minus 37 per cent), hotels (minus 43 per cent), and airlines (minus 55 per cent). I notice a growing unease among the equity gurus at the big US banks. JP Morgan says the risk no longer justifies the reward. Tobias Levkovich, from Citigroup, says his "panic/euphoria" model is now signalling an 80 per cent chance of an equity correction. He has cut his year-end target for the S&P 500 to 2900, a 10 per cent drop from current levels. Citigroup estimates that global profit forecasts for the next year are 30 per cent too high. Wall Street is being held up by a diminishing handful of equities. Microsoft and the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google/Alphabet) added half a trillion dollars in capitalisation over the six trading days up to the end of last week. I can appreciate Tesla's first-mover advantage in electrification but I do not believe that it is worth more than VW, Daimler and BMW combined. This tech surge has pushed Wall Street capitalisation to a record 152.2 per cent of GDP even as the pandemic spins out of control across the US Deep South, with a similar pattern building up in the Mid-West. Total hospitalisations in the US are back near their peak in early May. "Not to be hyperbolic, it really is the perfect storm," says Anthony Fauci, the US pandemic tsar. And remember, he warns us, this is still only "wave one". The FAANGs and Microsoft make up a quarter of the S&P 500 index by value, and 8 per cent of revenues, but employ just 1 per cent of the American workforce. Leaving aside the obvious point that a significant bloc of their customers is in difficulty, American society will not allow these companies to attain monopolistic supremacy for long. They will be broken on the democratic wheel. The monetarist view is that the sheer scale of QE and money creation by central banks trumps all else. We now have a perverse situation. The worldwide shock from COVID-19 is getting worse. The IMF has slashed its global growth forecast to minus 4.9 per cent for this year, from 3 per cent in April. The OECD has come in even lower. Its forecast for Europe is catastrophic, with figures ranging from minus 11.4 per cent to minus 14 per cent for France and Italy, and minus 11.5 per cent to minus 14 per cent for the UK, depending on the outcome of the pandemic. Equity bulls are betting that the combined fiscal and monetary stimulus is large enough to overwhelm the damage of the pandemic with all its long-tail consequences. But is it actually big enough if the crisis drags on for months in a messy fashion with fresh lockdowns? Emergency relief in the US and Europe was designed on the assumption that COVID-19 would be done and dusted by now. America has been running through the $US2 trillion injection of the Cares Act at a terrific pace. The Economic Policy Institute in Washington estimates a 10th of the US workforce will never regain their previous jobs. Nor have the job cuts ended. I find it hard to believe that there will be a surge in pent-up spending in this atmosphere of pervasive angst. It is more likely that large numbers of people will save frantically in self-defence, and this will combine with efforts by thousands of over-leveraged companies to pay down loans taken out during the crisis to stave off collapse. It will take years to rebuild damaged balance sheets. Nor is the European stimulus large enough or fast enough. The fiscal component of the recovery fund does not kick until next March at the earliest. Until then it is a patchwork of national plans, vastly differing in intensity. The monetarist view is that the sheer scale of QE and money creation by central banks trumps all else and will drive an explosive surge in activity almost by mechanical effect, probably culminating in an inflationary boom in 2021. I do not rule that out. But the monetarist premise, anchored on the theories of Milton Friedman, is that the velocity of circulation will return to normal over time and ignite this reservoir of monetary jet fuel. If they are wrong on that core point, the monetary expansion could prove to be inert. Nobel economist Myron Scholes told me over the weekend that the monetarists were likely to lose their bet this time. I pay attention because he cut his teeth under Friedman in Chicago before going on to master the arcane world of financial derivatives. His view is that the pandemic shock has broken large parts of the American economic system and accelerated the "death of Thatcherism" as dirigiste ideologies come back into favour. It will be a very long time before the process of creative destruction unleashes fresh growth. Specifically, he predicts that velocity will keep falling and the extra money created by the Fed will accumulate in idle excess reserves. "Milton Friedman was wrong; velocity can keep on falling," he said. "The banks cannot figure out how to lend in this environment and the multiplier only works if there is an opportunity to lend. You can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink." https://www.afr.com/markets/equity-markets/equity-bulls-believe-everything-is-fine-the-bond-markets-know-better-20200715-p55c4g
No fans, no home arenas... the playoffs are going to be a street fight. So which STREET FIGHTER is your team?
For this, we're going to tap into the cast of Street Fighter II (not # 1). I may be old, but I'm not that old.
WESTERN CONFERENCE STREET FIGHTERS
(1) L.A. Lakers as.... RYU It doesn't matter who's the betting favorite for the title or for MVP. The Los Angeles Lakers are the marquee team in the NBA, with the marquee player at center stage. If we were making a poster for the league, LeBron James would be front and center. (2) L.A. Clippers as... KEN As Pete Holmes asks on his ill-fated talk show, do we really need another Ryu? Do we really need another L.A. super-team? Does throwing on red jerseys/gis really distinguish one from the other? But of course, the answer is, hell yes. The Lakers-Clippers has finally become a worthwhile rivalry, with both teams reaching title contender status at the same time. Like Ken and Ryu, these two have plenty of history together. And while the Clippers never proved a formidable rival to the big brother Lakers, their new star Kawhi Leonard certainly did his own damage. Leonard helped the Spurs beat LeBron's Miami team back in the day, and he's on the verge of his second straight championship now. If Leonard can pull that off, he should surpass "The King" and inherit the throne as the greatest player on the planet. (3) Denver Nuggets as... E. HONDA Comparing hefty sumo E. Honda to Nikola Jokic is too easy. Too cheap. Too lazy. So naturally, let's just do that and move on. (4) Houston Rockets as... BLANKA In Street Fighter, we have some classic fighter tropes. The sumo wrestler, the boxer, the ... green electric jungle monster?? WTF is that?? Similarly, Daryl Morey and the Houston Rockets have experimented and developed a monster unlike anything the NBA has seen before. (5) Oklahoma City Thunder as... CHUN-LI You may not expected a woman to come into a street fighting tournament and kick some ass, but that's exactly what Chun-Li intended to do. Similarly, the Oklahoma City Thunder were written off immediately this season (with an oveunder of 32.5 wins) only to defy expectations and hold their own. In fact, their winning percentage is even better than last season when they had Russell Westbrook and Paul George. Now facing a Westbrook-less(?) Houston team, they may not be such an underdog after all. (6) Utah Jazz as... DHALSIM Mystical yoga master Dhalism may not have the look of a vicious street fighter with his gangly physique, but when he extends his arms he becomes a difficult opponent to land punches on. Similarly, Utah's stringy center Rudy Gobert wins primarily with length (7'9" wingspan.) And while he may still be getting some bikram-level heat from the media and fans after the coronavirus episode, he'll have every chance to prove his worth in this first round matchup against Nikola Jokic and Denver. (7) Dallas Mavericks as... VEGA The masked man Vega is among the most dangerous fighters in the game, in no small part to the sharp claw that he's somehow allowed to yield into battle. Similarly, the Dallas Mavericks have their own unfair weapon in Luka Doncic, the 20-year-old who can slice and dice his way to 30-10-10 games. Doncic -- like Vega -- also cut his teeth (and claw) in Spain (playing for Real Madrid.) (8) Portland Trail Blazers as... BALROG In Street Fighter, boxer "Balrog" was a shameless ripoff of Mike Tyson to the point where they had to change the name (from "M. Bison") to avoid lawsuits. Portland may need to hire good counsel as well. After getting whacked by rival Golden State last season, they're taking a page right from the Warriors playbook. Damian Lillard is doing his best Steph Curry impression, launching 10 threes a game this year (and hitting 40%). Without Curry and the Warriors around anymore, perhaps this version has a puncher's chance of pulling off some more upsets.
EASTERN CONFERENCE STREET FIGHTERS
(1) Milwaukee Bucks as... M. BISON We've seen great players emerge from outside North America before, but none of them have ever been the consensus best in the world at a point in time. Dirk Nowitzki won MVP and a title, sure, but not in the same year. Giannis Antetokounmpo has the chance to do that this season if he can win MVP, DPOY, and a championship all in one fell swoop. If he does, he'll reign over them all. Like M. Bison, the mystery man has emerged from the far corners of the world and threatened global domination. For you, the day the Greek Freak dropped 40-20 on your team was the most memorable game of your season. But for him? It was Tuesday. (2) Toronto Raptors as... SAGAT With all the talk about Eastern power M. Bison, people tend to overlook the destructive potential of Sagat. Remember, this is a competitor who held the belt last time around in Street Fighter I. The Toronto Raptors may still be lost in the shadows of their woodland rival, but they can more than hold their own thanks to their length and title experience. (3) Boston Celtics as... GUILE Air Force special operative Guile represents 'MURICA! right down to the flag tattoo on his bicep. Yet, strangely, the film portrayal of Guile had more than a hint of European in him thanks to the performance of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Likewise, there's nothing more American than the "Boston Celtics," who sport at least 4 different stars born and raised in the good ol' U.S. of A in Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Gordon Hayward, and Kemba Walker as well as an aw' shucks apple pie coach from the heartland in Brad Stevens. Yet, strangely, there's more than a hint of a European style to their play thanks to their ball movement and socialist scoring (with all four stars between 17-23 PPG.) (4) Indiana Pacers as... CAMMY With Street Fighter II characters running out, we're going to have to extend into the Special Edition bonus characters like Cammy. Cammy was the second female character introduced. She was there, we swear. Similarly, the Indiana Pacers are in this playoffs, we swear. (5) Miami Heat as... T. HAWK Another add-in character, T. Hawk is described as an indigenous warrior from Mexico "whose ancestral homeland was taken over by Shadaloo, forcing him into exile." Sounds like the plight of sullen and wayward warrior Jimmy Butler to me. After being exiled from Chicago... and Minnesota... and Philly (kinda), Butler has found a new home with this rugged Miami Heat team. If his tribe members can supply enough shooting and arrows around him, they'll be a dangerous party to pass through. (6) Philadelphia 76ers as... ZANGIEF Russian mauler Zangief entered the tournament with an unusual approach: strength and size over speed. Similarly, big man Elton Brand prioritized size and strength this summer when he signed Al Horford to go along with Joel Embiid. The twin towers approach needs to work now, because the Sixers don't have another choice now that Ben Simmons will miss significant time. (7) Brooklyn Nets as... DEE JAY Another new character, video game makers must have figured Dee Jay would catch on with the young'ins. He's hip! He's cool! He's a recording artist! Heck, even his name is Dee Jay! He's the next big thing! Similarly, the Brooklyn Nets are banking on being a big deal in the future. Sure, their current roster is a plucky group of overachievers, but by this time next year, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving (if healthy) may have them among the title favorites. (8) Orlando Magic as... SCOTT and MAX Shit. We've officially run out of Street Fighter II characters. Or have we? A google deep dive suggests that the two characters from the intro loading screen have names. "Scott and Max." Similarly, these Orlando Magic may only be here in the playoffs to serve as an introduction to the rest of the action. If Milwaukee is going to run the table, they need to beat somebody in round one. Orlando (minus Jon Isaac) will have to play that role of "somebody."
News Heading into Wednesday August 19th 2020 NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT YOLO THE VARIOUS TICKERS WITHOUT DOING RESEARCH. THE TIME STAMPS ON THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES MAY BE LATER THAN OTHERS ON THE WEB. THE CREATOR OF THIS THREAD COMPILED THE FOLLOWING IN A QUICK MANNER AND DOES NOT ATTEST TO THE VERACITY OF THE INFORMATION BELOW. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR VETTING YOUR OWN SOURCES AND DOING YOUR OWN DD.
GNCA Genocea -1.8% as holders file to offer 21.39M shares
VRNA Verona Pharma Initiates Multiple Dose Part of Phase 2 Clinical Trial with pMDI Formulation of Ensifentrine in COPD (Overnight News).
AXDX Accelerate Diagnostics up 13% on FDA emergency use nod for COVID-19 test (Overnight News).
CYDY CytoDyn requests “Fast Track Approval” in U.K for COVID-19 trial (Overnight News).
HUD Dufry to buy rest of Hudson in $311 million deal (Overnight News).
BTG B2Gold Continues to Operate Unimpeded at its Fekola Mine in Mali (Overnight News).
REGN Regeneron teams with Roche to triple supply of its COVID-19 drug (Overnight News).
MTP Midatech Pharma Announces Exercise of Warrants and Issue of Equity (Overnight News).
ON ON Semiconductor Announces Upsize and Pricing of Private Offering of $700 Million of 3.875% Senior Notes (Overnight News).
RXT Rackspace Technology Announces Results of Global Cloud Budget Survey, Uncovers the Hidden Complexities of IT Spend Management (Overnight News).
GS Booking app Omio raises $100 million in travel recovery bet (Overnight News).
CHGG Chegg Prices Offering of $900.0 Million of 0% Convertible Senior Notes Due 2026 (Overnight News).
FUTU Futu Announces Pricing of Offering of 9,500,000 American Depositary Shares (Overnight News).
BCOV Streamed Video Content Dominates Media and Entertainment Consumption According to the Brightcove Q2 2020 Global Video Index (Overnight News).
ORCL Trump Expresses Support for Oracle to Buy TikTok (Overnight News).
BX Takeda preparing to sell Japan consumer health unit to Blackstone: Kyodo (Overnight News).
NOVA GAF Energy and Sunnova Launch Strategic Partnership to Expand Roof-Integrated Solar Options for Homeowners (Overnight News).
EQNR Equinor’s share saving plan allocates shares (Overnight News).
AAPL Apple Revamps Music Radio Service With A Rebranded Beats 1, And Two New Stations (Overnight News).
World’s largest shipping firm says demand will ‘significantly decline’ this year(Overnight News).
NI NiSource Inc. Announces Pricing and Preliminary Results of its Any and All Tender Offer
WU Western Union Now Available at CARD Bank (Overnight News).
INBX Form S-1MEF (registration adding securities to prior form s-1 registration [rule 462(b)]) filed with the SEC
GILD Gilead comes up empty with U.S. application for filgotinib for rheumatoid arthritis
MIDD The Middleby Prices Upsized Offering of $650 Million Convertible Senior Notes Due 2025
U.S., China to expand airline flights between them to eight per week. (UAL, DAL, CEA, ZNH)
JUUL MO Juul E-Cigarette Getting FDA Review to Stay on the U.S. Market
HRMY Form S-1MEF (registration adding securities to prior form s-1 registration [rule 462(b)]) filed with the SEC
CDNS Cadence's John Wall to Present at KeyBanc Future of Technology Series
EHTH EHealth chief bullish on future, increases stake to 703K shares
ZNGA Zynga Becomes Largest Mobile Game Maker by Market Share
CNDT Conduent +3.2% as it names Icahn's Gary to board for settlement
RMAX RE/MAX 2020 Broker Owner Conference Features Memorable Speakers, Valuable Lessons and the Launch of New Tools, Training and Technology for its Global Network of Entrepreneurs
CNNE Cannae Holdings Announces Investment in Foley Trasimene Acquisition Corp. II’s Recently Priced $1.3 Billion Initial Public Offering
BFT Foley Trasimene Acquisition Corp. II Announces Pricing of Upsized $1.3 Billion Initial Public Offering
RIO Rio Tinto cuts 2020 refined copper outlook on smelter restart delay in Utah mine
AR Antero Resources Announces Pricing of $250 Million Offering of Convertible Senior Notes
III Asia Pacific Sourcing Slumps in Q2 on Pandemic Concerns
QHRC Quest Resource Holding to Present Virtually and Host 1x1 Investor Meetings at the 11th Annual Midwest Ideas Investor Conference on August 26th & 27th
REV C Citi Resigns Role on Brigade CLO Deal Amid Escalating Loan Feud
REV C Citigroup wins freeze on funds mistakenly sent to Revlon creditors
RDFN Late-Summer Housing Market is Unseasonably Hot, Prices Up 10% and Pending Sales Up 13%
RPAI Retail Properties Of America Prices $400.0 Million Offering Of Senior Unsecured Notes
SRNE Sorrento Therapeutics -10.4% after CFO's ouster
STAR iStar Pricing $400 Million of Senior Unsecured Notes
CWT California Water Service Group Honored as Silver Stevie® Award Winner for COVID-19 Employer Response
JNPR Archdiocese of Brisbane Selects Juniper Networks to Provide AI-Driven Wi-Fi Solutions Across Its Operations
ROP Roper Technologies Prices Public Offering Of $300 Million Senior Unsecured Notes Due 2022, $700 Million Senior Unsecured Notes Due 2025, $700 Million Senior Unsecured Notes Due 2027 And $1 Billion Senior Unsecured Notes Due 2031
TTEK Tetra Tech Wins $29.7 Million USAID Renewable Energy Contract
SPKE Spark Energy Announces Class A Common Stock Share Buyback Program
DMYD dMY Technology Group II Announces Closing of Underwriters’ Over-Allotment Option in Connection with its Initial Public Offering
GVA Granite Inliner receives C$12M sewer maintenance project in Canada
BPYU Brookfield Property REIT Inc. Announces Final Results of Tender Offer
PSN Parsons completes requirements for operations at SWPF
LE Lands' End works out deal for more financial breathing room
SABR Sabre falls after $250M convertible, common stock offerings
HDS HD Supply Holdings Announces Fiscal 2020 Second-Quarter Earnings Release Date and Conference Call
HHC The Howard Hughes® Announces Closing Of An Offering Of $750,000,000 Senior Notes Due 2028
GASS STEALTHGAS Announces the Date for the Release of the Second Quarter and Six Months 2020 Financial and Operating Results, Conference Call and Webcast
AFG American Financial Group Increases Annual Common Stock Dividend by 11%; Fifteenth Consecutive Year of Dividend Increases
RXT Onica Introduces Contact Center Intelligence Solution Built on Amazon Web Services
MRCY Mercury Systems awarded patent for cyberattack protection technology
PRTS Announces Closing of Public Offering of Common Stock and Full Exercise of the Underwriters' Over-Allotment Option
For all these drones here falling into this Ponzi scheme called the Stock Market, you people need to shape up and smell the socialism. I copied this from another Reddit user cal_student37 who summarized it succinctly: "Inefficient" doesn't seem to describe the problem. The stock market is very efficient at growing capital for those who already have it. It's how the bourgeoisie both exploit profits from workers and maintain legal ownership over the means of production. Although there are ups, downs, readjustments, etc. the stock market is generally excellent at accomplishing this distribution of resources. Most regular people's interactions with the stock market are through structured / risk averse retirement funds. Such investors are just there along for the ride. Although it's a far far far less equitable system for retirement (say compared to pensions), it still gets the job done. Just cross your fingers that you don't turn 65 during a recession. People who do try to "beat the market" are essentially gambling their money, but this is not really the primary purpose of the market and describes a relatively small percentage of people. Although there are many con man who will gamble with other people's money while pretending to be what I described in the previous paragraph. Any legitimate financial advisory or personal finance literature will recommend against it. In a lifetime though (and excluding having to begin withdrawing during a recession), an average person will not lose if they invest with the flow. That's not to say that they'll get far less form the system than they deserve, while the bourgeoisie syphon off most of the profits. In a socialist / transitioning economy, something like a stock market could still exist to distribute capital. All of the players would need to be public / socially owned and not private. Furthermore, a mechanism would need to be implemented so that "prices" reflect more than just exploitative profits." I read a whole bunch of capitalist worshipping idiots here who keep talking about Options, shares, Apple, Google, Elon Musk's used condoms, etc when you should be focusing on advocating a Communist Stock Exchange for Wall Street that should have been implemented yesterday. Have all the employees of 100% of the companies trading right now own all the stocks. Get the government to do an asset seizure and redistribute all shares of Google, Apple, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, etc to everyone from temp workers, contractors, and janitors. Every gets their 1% or equal ownership of the whole company. Make stocks DEMOCRATIC BABY! Dont end up like these guys here who talked a good game about investing and is now thinking of suicide and Prozac mixed with scotch. https://www.npr.org/2018/12/23/678238031/for-madoff-victims-scars-remain-10-years-later "At 62, Heimoff was suddenly forced to refinance his condominium in Oakland, California, and severely cut back on spending. He contemplated suicide. " Everyone here could end up like Heimoff and millions of others who got burned. This wasn't bad luck or stupid investing this was the SYSTEM that you idiots all trade on. Take one example: Amazon NASDAQ: AMZN Shares as of today closed at 2,960.47 USD +5.56 (0.19%) Sounds impressive right? Until you read the total fuk job the company is doing to the employees, the sellers, the government, and the public. https://time.com/5870826/amazon-coronavirus-jeff-bezos-congress/ As one Amazon seller put it "more democracy, less dictatorship" is what this company needs. It would seem this could be put to all the companies in the Fortune 500. Have everyone with a stock portfolio threaten a liquidation sell off until all the companies give their stocks to their employees. For Amazon and eBay they should give the active sellers on their sites, the janitors, the warehouse workers, even their mailman a piece of their stock no questions asked. Make stock affordable and accessible to everyone and do it yesterday. Redistribute stocks! No more selling at high prices, people get the stock they keep it and pass it down the family. People can live off the dividends anyway. The Fed is giving away taxpayer money in the trillions for free after all. Those fed loans might get repaid in 10000+ years so who cares? Oh and also get rid of that shit called AAA stock or B stock or whatever crap alphabet soup stock class. ALL STOCKS should be categorized as 1 CLASS stock. You either own stock or you don't. No AAA, XXX, NC17 stocks should exist anymore. I'm willing to bet when you make big companies like Amazon become EMPLOYEE owned companies their share prices would double in a month. Everyone has a vote in the company. No more dictatorships. America is supposed to be a free society so lets make the corporations a free democracy too. Noone gets fired or laid off without a vote. Noone gets the chump change they call a salary that Amazon expects their workers to "subsidize" their income with food stamps and fed assistance. How many of you expect to be joining all those millions of people lining up in soup kitchens and food banks? If you dont want that happening to you or your kids you better wake the fuck up and demand full on communism in the stock exchange. Thats literally the only option you have left for survival.
PERSONAL NOTE: I WILL BE ON A BUSINESS TRIP FOR THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF AUGUST (1-16). I WILL LIKELY NOT HAVE THE TIME TO PUBLISH THE PRE-MARKET BRIEFS DURING THIS PERIOD.
News Heading into Wednesday July 29th 2020 NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT YOLO THE VARIOUS TICKERS WITHOUT DOING RESEARCH. THE TIME STAMPS ON THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES MAY BE LATER THAN OTHERS ON THE WEB. THE CREATOR OF THIS THREAD COMPILED THE FOLLOWING IN A QUICK MANNER AND DOES NOT ATTEST TO THE VERACITY OF THE INFORMATION BELOW. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR VETTING YOUR OWN SOURCES AND DOING YOUR OWN DD.
DB ($9.45) Deutsche Bank posts second-quarter net loss as restructuring continues amid the pandemic
BCS ($5.76) Barclays posts profit slide as the firm sets aside another £1.6 billion for coronavirus-related loan losses
CCJ ($11.98) Cameco reports first quarter results – well positioned in a strengthening uranium market
IBM IBM Report: Compromised Employee Accounts Led to Most Expensive Data Breaches Over Past Year
LUV Southwest Airlines Announces Pricing of Notes (Everyone saw this coming)
VIAC ViacomCBS Scores 83 Primetime Emmy Award Nominations
BOXL,price%20of%20%242.00%20per%20share) ($2.49) Boxlight Announces Pricing of $30.0 Million Public Offering of Common Stock. (15,000,000 shares of its common stock at a public offering price of $2.00 per share)
GPRO GoPro Turns To Selling Outdoor Gear As Coronavirus Impacts Business
ATTO ($1.59) Atento announces reverse share split to comply with NYSE's listing requirements
EPIX ($6.23) ESSA Pharma Announces Pricing of Public Offering of Common Shares
BGFV ($6.28) Big 5 Sporting Goods +25% after pointing to accelerating sales
GNCA ($5.28) $7,090,335.00 of shares acquired by New Enterprise Associates 16, L.p. (10% Owner), reported in a new form 4 filed with the SEC
SAN Banco Santander Posts Loss In H1, Underlying Profit Down
PFE Pfizer To Charge $39 Per Coronavirus Vaccine Course To All Developed Countries For Similar Volume Commitments As US
QUMU ($4.65) reaffirms FY20 revenue outlook (Source: Seeking A)
US Department of Defense awards new contracts to CAT, LMT, HOLX
MRNA Moderna Looking To Price Its Coronavirus Vaccine At $50-$60, Significantly Above Rivals
MCD Shares in McDonald's Japan affiliate drop after U.S. group says to trim stake
ARCT Arcturus Therapeutics Announces Pricing of $173.0 Million Public Offering of Common Stock
AAPL Apple Registers 225% iPhone Sales Growth In Q2 In China, Remains Fastest-Growing Smartphone Maker: Report
ATUS Altice Sells Lightpath Stake to Morgan Stanley for $2.3 Billion
LB Victoria’s Secret parent L Brands to slash 15% of corporate workforce
MHH Mastech Digital Announces Filing Of Universal Shelf Registration Statement
SDGR Viva Biotech and Schrödinger Announce Strategic Collaboration to Generate and Interrogate Structures for Unsolved Targets
CRTX Cortexyme Presents Data Linking P. gingivalis Infection to Cardiovascular Disease Severity and Alzheimer's Disease, Along With Evidence That Treatment With Atuzaginstat (COR388) Improves Biomarkers Associated With Both Diseases
BG World’s Biggest Soy Exporters Hit by Virus Spread in Argentina
SNY and GSK agree with the UK government to supply up to 60 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine
AMD AMD pops after it raises revenue forecast for the year
Wall Street Week Ahead for the trading week beginning March 2nd, 2020
Good Saturday morning to all of you here on stocks. I hope everyone on this sub made out pretty nicely in the market this past week, and is ready for the new trading week and month ahead. Here is everything you need to know to get you ready for the trading week beginning March 2nd, 2020.
Stock rout may deepen in the week ahead as coronavirus impact starts to show up in economic data - (Source)
Stock investors just experienced one of the nastiest weeks in history that recorded the S&P 500′s fastest correction on record, but hold on tight, the market might have more room to fall as the coronavirus damage starts to creep into upcoming economic data, analysts warned. Major U.S. stock averages suffered their worst week since the financial crisis as fears about the coronavirus disrupting the global economy scared investors away from risk assets. However, stocks might still be searching for a bottom next week when investors grapple with a slew of economic data potentially dragged down by the outbreak. The Institute for Supply Management will release its manufacturing gauge on Monday. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve will publish its latest Beige Book on Wednesday, which will detail anecdotal information on current economic conditions. Many expect U.S. manufacturing to have taken a hit from the coronavirus. “Look out for ISM surveys and Beige Book for early signs of COVID-19 impact,” Michelle Meyer, Bank of America’s head of U.S. economics, said in a note Friday. “It will take time for the ‘hard’ economic data to show the impact but we are already seeing evidence in early economic indicators.” Weekend action? The outlook for the week could be changed this weekend by coronavirus headlines or by some sort of intervention by central banks. Expectations are rising on Wall Street that there could be some potential move from the Federal Reserve to get ahead of what could be another rough week. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said Friday the central bank is monitoring the coronavirus and pledged action if necessary. Meanwhile, former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh recommended the Fed act as quickly as Sunday before the markets reopen. The market is already pricing in a 100% chance of at least one rate cut at the Fed’s March policy meeting. Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group, is worried about the cascading effect of coronavirus hitting upcoming economic data points. “ISM manufacturing is going to be widely scrutinized,” he said. The ISM manufacturing index rose to a reading of 50.9 last month, the highest level since July (Any reading above 50 signals expansion.) Bank of America expects ISM manufacturing to pull back to 50.0 and said Fed Beige Book may provide “early insight” into the U.S. economic impact from the deadly virus. Cutting forecasts Next week, investors will also likely grapple with more warnings from major companies about broken supply chains and easing demand due to the outbreak. Apple, Microsoft, Nike and United Airlines have all sounded alarms that they will not meet their earnings and revenue guidance because of the virus. Wall Street strategists this week were quick to slash their forecasts on corporate earnings and the stock market. Barclays sees the S&P 500 to end the year at 3,000, down from a previous forecast of 3,300. The bank also expects a 2% drop in profits this year. Meanwhile, Goldman said it sees zero earnings growth for American companies in 2020. To be sure, some believe the steep stock rout has gone too far too fast, betting on at least a small rebound. “The level of panic has become very extreme and the level of downside price movement is pretty extreme. All of that is to me more of a sign that we are getting closer to the beginning of the end of it,” Paulsen said. Another source of support could come from the Trump administration, where officials are discussing tax cuts, among other economic reactions, as one option to make up for the economic impact of the coronavirus, the Washington Post reported Friday. Still, investors will have to be on edge for a while now with more virus headlines, as well as the key Super Tuesday Democratic primaries. Some notable investors including “bond king” Jeffrey Gundlach blamed the rise of Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders for helping accelerate massive sell-off.
This past week saw the following moves in the S&P:
The coronavirus outbreak—or Covid-19 —has caused significant market volatility over the past week. Our approach as always is to focus on economic fundamentals first, but the uncertainty around the scope of the outbreak has made it very difficult to assess potential impact. The situation clearly is unsettling for investors as more cases are reported across Europe and Asia, and the first case of community transmission has been reported in the United States. As this was written, the S&P 500 Index was 10% below its February 19 all-time high. “The Covid-19 outbreak continues to significantly disrupt economic activity in China and throughout Asia,” said LPL Financial Senior Market Strategist Ryan Detrick. “Given that China is such a big component of many global supply chains, we will almost certainly see weaker economic data globally over the next several months.” Even as the situation remains fluid and very uncertain, we want to provide some sense of the potential U.S. and global economic impact. China: If virus containment holds in China, which is our base case, we could see something like a 3–4 percentage point impact to Chinese economic growth in the first quarter—possibly 2–3% gross domestic product (GDP) growth rather than 5–6%—followed by a much more modest hit in the second quarter. We think we would see a return to trend growth by the third quarter of 2020. This scenario would put China’s 2020 GDP growth below the current 5.6% Bloomberg-tracked consensus, shown in the LPL Chart of the Day, and the Chinese government’s previous 6% annual target. In other words, China’s GDP growth in 2020 could end up closer to 5% than 6%.
United States: At this point, our base case is that any economic disruption in the United States may be modest and short-lived, as we expect domestic efforts at containment to be more successful and have less economic disruption than in China. The outbreak may trim 0.25–0.5% from U.S. GDP over the next couple of months due to global supply chain disruption, falling export demand, and decreased tourism. If evidence emerges over the next month or so that the virus is being contained successfully, as we expect, the economic impact would likely be at the better end of that range (0.25%). In that scenario, damage to business and consumer confidence would be limited, setting the stage for a potential second-quarter rebound. We believe our 1.75% U.S. GDP growth forecast may still be achievable.
Global: In the short-term, the collective hits to global GDP from China, South Korea, Japan, and Italy—the countries where the outbreak impact has been greatest to date—may comprise 0.2–0.3% of global GDP. Our latest global GDP forecast of 3.5% from our Outlook 2020 publication is probably a bit too high in light of the latest news. We expect to update or reaffirm our economic forecasts once we have more clarity around Covid-19 impact in the weeks ahead.
Can the Market Bottom on a Friday?
It's often said that equity markets can't bottom on a Friday. One of the reasons for this line of thinking is that during a market downturn, no one wants to hold onto or bid up equities into a weekend for fear of further bad news. It may just be a matter of semantics, but based on that line of reasoning, the more accurate way to phrase it would be that markets can't bottom on a Thursday or rallies can't begin on a Friday. However you want to think about it, the chart below shows the number of times the closing low of a 10%+ correction has occurred on various weekdays. Of the 97 S&P 500 corrections since 1928, the day of the week that has marked the low close of a 10%+ decline the least frequently is actually Wednesday with only 10. Behind Wednesday, Friday has been the second most infrequent day of the week for a bottom (15), and Thursday is the only other day of the week where the S&P 500 has made a low on a closing basis less than 20 times. The days of the week where the S&P 500 most frequently bottoms are Monday and Tuesday with 26 and 28, respectively.
Regarding bear markets (20%+ declines), the trend is very similar. Bear markets have been the least likely to end on a Wednesday or Friday and most likely to end on a Tuesday.
Dividend Stock Spotlight: S&P 500's Highest Yielders From The Sell-Off
Given the lower prices of stocks, dividend yields have been on the rise over the past couple of weeks. The dividend yield of the S&P 500 now stands at 2.12% which is the highest since June 3rd of last year when it reached the same level, but only stayed there for a single day. Prior to that, yields were only higher during the Q4 2018 sell-off through February of 2019. At the beginning of the current sell-off on February 19th, the S&P 500's yield was 26 bps lower at 1.86%.
Of the individual stocks in the index, there are now 81 stocks that have dividend yields of 4% or more. That compares to only 64 at the beginning of the sell-off. In the table below, we show the 25 highest yielders of the S&P 500 as well as the price change and change in the dividend yield since the 2/19 record high. As shown, there is only one stock, Macy's (M), that yields over 10% at the moment. This major retailer has fallen out of favor in the past few years but the stock has gotten crushed since the 2/19 market peak having fallen just under 21% in that time. That decline has raised the dividend yield by 2.44 percentage points, but there is one other stock that has seen its yield increase by even more. That stock is Occidental Petroleum (OXY), the second-highest yielder in the index (9.93%). Being an Energy name, OXY has fallen the most dramatically (-29.05%) since 2/19 of all the highest yielders.
While there is a lot of overlap, in the table below we show the stocks that have seen their dividend yields rise the most as stocks have declined since 2/19. Again OXY and M top the list. While no other stocks have seen their dividend yields increase by more than 2 percentage points, there are another 17 who have risen by at least 1 percentage point. Notably, two cruise line stocks, Carnival (CCL) and Royal Caribbean (RCL) find themselves on this list. Carnival (CCL) now yields 6.28% while Royal Caribbean (RCL) yields 4.05%.
It is no secret that energy stocks have gotten crushed this year, and the list of the 25 worst-performing stocks in the Russell 1000 since the previous record close on February 19th is a prime example of this. Seven energy stocks find themselves on this list, two of which, Chesapeake Energy (CHK) and Kosmos Energy (KOS), take up the number one and two spots having fallen 45.73% and 41.95%, respectively since 2/19. CHK had already been weak headed into the broader market sell-off with a YTD loss on 2/19 over 40%; the past week has added fuel to the fire as it is now down 68.5% YTD. Continental (CLR), Centennial Resource Development (CDEV), Transocean (RIG), and Apergy (APY) are other energy stocks that were down 20% or more on the year headed into this sell-off, and each one has fallen another 20%+ since the 19th. While most of the other biggest losers since 2/19 had already been down on the year, there are some that have seen their gains in 2020 get erased due to this sell-off like Nutanix (NTNX), Qurate Retail (QRTEA), Anaplan (PLAN), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Chemours (CC), and CommScope (COMM). Some other notable losers of this group have been those heavily reliant on travel like American Airlines (AAL) and the cruise line stocks like Norwegian (NCLH) and Royal Caribbean (RCL).
Given how breadth has been over the past week, it may not come as any surprise that since the February 19th high there are only 18 stocks of 1000 in the Russell 1000 index that are higher. Four of those are up less than one percent. In the table below we show all of these stocks. Given the sell-off has centered around coronavirus fears, it is sensical that a coronavirus vaccine developer Moderna (MRNA) is the best performing stock since 2/19. What is amazing is there was not much momentum with this name headed into the sell-off. As of 2/19, the stock was actually down 3.27% year to date, but as the Covid-19 saga has moved along it is now up well north of 30% on the year. A few other health care names like Regeneron (REGN) and Gilead (GILD) have also benefited from the coronavirus.
The histogram below shows the distribution of performance of Russell 1000 stocks since 2/19. As mentioned above, there are very few stocks in the index that are up since the 2/19 high. The highest share of stocks are down between 10% and 15% while the next highest share are down between 5% and 10%. Of the worst decliners, there are 75 stocks that have fallen over 20%.
Looking at the individual sectors, again Energy was extremely weak even before equities sold off. On 2/19, the average Energy stock in the Russell 1000 in that sector was down 15.6% YTD. While they hadn't tipped into the red yet, Consumer Staples were only up 1 bp.
Since the 2/19 high for the US equity market, the average stock in the Russell 1,000 is down well over 10%. The average Energy stock is down the most at -21%, followed by Communication Services and Technology at -13%. Consumer Staples stocks have performed the best with an average decline of 8.9%.
This leaves every sector down year-to-date. Utilities have generally outperformed only falling 2.3%, but the sector is sitting on a loss nonetheless. Of the worst sectors, Industrials, Consumer Discretionary, Materials, and of course Energy have fallen 10% or more.
The recent equity sell-off has clearly been global in nature as concerns of a global pandemic rise. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the way equities have sold off recently is that the country that has been hardest hit by the virus is closer to its YTD high than any other major global equity benchmark. The chart below shows the distance that each major global equity benchmark has declined relative to its YTD high. China's Shanghai Composite is down just 4.45%, which is better than any other country shown. Sure, you could argue that the Chinese government is manipulating the market and prohibiting investors from selling, but even the ETF that tracks the CSI 300 (ASHR) is down less than 6%, so anyone could go in and trade at these levels. Manipulated or not, the numbers are the numbers. At the bottom of the list, Brazil's Ibovespa index is down more than any other country at 11.6% and that country has only reported one confirmed case so far. With respect to US indices, the Russell 2000 is down the second most of any major global benchmark (-9.19%), while the Nasdaq is down the fourth most at 8.68%. Even the S&P 500 is down close to 8%. These weak US readings come in a backdrop where there have only been 57 confirmed cases and all but a couple are instances where Americans contracted the virus outside of the United States and have been brought to the US under quarantine. Join Bespoke Premium to access Bespoke's most actionable stock market research and analysis.
There's still another day left in the week, but unless things improve on Friday this will go down as one of the worst weeks for US equities in history. Since WWII, there have only been four other weeks where the S&P 500 was down more than 10% in a given week. On a related note, there are also only four stocks in the entire S&P 500 that are positive for the week! Leading the way higher, Regeneron (REGN) is up a healthy 7.1% while Gilead (GILD) is up just over 4%. Behind these two, the only other stocks that are higher now than they were at last Friday's close are Clorox (CLX) and CME Group (CME).
On the downside, there are a lot more losers, but in the interest of space, below we have only listed the 17 stocks in the S&P 500 that are down over 20% this week alone. Looking through the names on the list, the cruise lines are well represented with Royal Caribbean (RCL), Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCLH), and Carnival (CCL). Besides these names, American Airlines (AAL) is down 26%, while Live Nation (LYV) is down 22.2%. One thing we've heard a number of people argue the last few days is that some of the weakness this week is related to the increasing likelihood that Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination. If that's the case, why is not a single one of the worst-performing stocks from the Health Care sector, and why is the Health Care sector the third best performing sector this week and one of just four that is not down 10% so far this week?
Below are some of the notable companies coming out with earnings releases this upcoming trading week ahead which includes the date/time of release & consensus estimates courtesy of Earnings Whispers:
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Target Corp. $103.00
Target Corp. (TGT) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 6:30 AM ET on Tuesday, March 3, 2020. The consensus earnings estimate is $1.66 per share on revenue of $23.49 billion and the Earnings Whisper ® number is $1.68 per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 74% expecting an earnings beat Consensus estimates are for year-over-year earnings growth of 8.50% with revenue increasing by 2.23%. On Friday, February 28, 2020 there was some notable buying of 3,641 contracts of the $100.00 put expiring on Friday, March 20, 2020.
Plug Power, Inc. (PLUG) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 7:00 AM ET on Thursday, March 5, 2020. The consensus estimate is for a loss of $0.06 per share on revenue of $90.15 million and the Earnings Whisper ® number is ($0.05) per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 66% expecting an earnings beat. Consensus estimates are for year-over-year earnings growth of 25.00% with revenue increasing by 50.70%. Short interest has increased by 29.2% since the company's last earnings release while the stock has drifted higher by 59.6% from its open following the earnings release to be 39.8% above its 200 day moving average of $3.10. Overall earnings estimates have been revised lower since the company's last earnings release. On Friday, January 17, 2020 there was some notable buying of 2,010 contracts of the $5.00 put expiring on Friday, March 20, 2020. Option traders are pricing in a 20.0% move on earnings and the stock has averaged a 4.1% move in recent quarters.
JD.com, Inc. (JD) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 5:00 AM ET on Monday, March 2, 2020. The consensus earnings estimate is $0.44 per share on revenue of $23.81 billion and the Earnings Whisper ® number is $0.47 per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 76% expecting an earnings beat. Consensus estimates are for year-over-year earnings growth of 1,000.00% with revenue increasing by 21.41%. Short interest has decreased by 9.9% since the company's last earnings release while the stock has drifted higher by 9.9% from its open following the earnings release to be 19.4% above its 200 day moving average of $32.25. Overall earnings estimates have been revised higher since the company's last earnings release. On Wednesday, February 12, 2020 there was some notable buying of 8,001 contracts of the $38.00 put expiring on Friday, March 20, 2020. Option traders are pricing in a 11.5% move on earnings and the stock has averaged a 5.3% move in recent quarters.
Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (ZM) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 4:05 PM ET on Wednesday, March 4, 2020. The consensus earnings estimate is $0.07 per share on revenue of $176.36 million and the Earnings Whisper ® number is $0.10 per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 82% expecting an earnings beat The company's guidance was for earnings of approximately $0.07 per share on revenue of $175.00 million to $176.00 million. The stock has drifted higher by 63.4% from its open following the earnings release to be 29.0% above its 200 day moving average of $81.40. Overall earnings estimates have been revised higher since the company's last earnings release. The stock has averaged a 12.1% move on earnings in recent quarters.
Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 4:15 PM ET on Thursday, March 5, 2020. The consensus earnings estimate is $2.06 per share on revenue of $38.34 billion and the Earnings Whisper ® number is $2.10 per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 75% expecting an earnings beat. Consensus estimates are for year-over-year earnings growth of 2.49% with revenue increasing by 8.32%. Short interest has decreased by 9.0% since the company's last earnings release while the stock has drifted lower by 4.6% from its open following the earnings release to be 1.6% below its 200 day moving average of $285.72. Overall earnings estimates have been revised higher since the company's last earnings release. On Thursday, February 27, 2020 there was some notable buying of 1,125 contracts of the $285.00 put expiring on Friday, March 20, 2020. Option traders are pricing in a 8.2% move on earnings and the stock has averaged a 3.8% move in recent quarters.
Tilray, Inc. (TLRY) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 4:05 PM ET on Monday, March 2, 2020. The consensus estimate is for a loss of $0.34 per share on revenue of $55.35 million and the Earnings Whisper ® number is ($0.40) per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 51% expecting an earnings beat. Consensus estimates are for earnings to decline year-over-year by 3.03% with revenue increasing by 256.38%. Short interest has increased by 25.9% since the company's last earnings release while the stock has drifted lower by 32.1% from its open following the earnings release to be 49.5% below its 200 day moving average of $28.57. Overall earnings estimates have been revised lower since the company's last earnings release. On Wednesday, February 26, 2020 there was some notable buying of 2,011 contracts of the $15.00 call expiring on Friday, April 17, 2020. Option traders are pricing in a 26.7% move on earnings and the stock has averaged a 8.5% move in recent quarters.
AutoZone, Inc. (AZO) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 6:55 AM ET on Tuesday, March 3, 2020. The consensus earnings estimate is $11.87 per share on revenue of $2.58 billion and the Earnings Whisper ® number is $12.01 per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 73% expecting an earnings beat. Consensus estimates are for year-over-year earnings growth of 3.31% with revenue increasing by 5.28%. Short interest has decreased by 7.1% since the company's last earnings release while the stock has drifted lower by 16.7% from its open following the earnings release to be 7.3% below its 200 day moving average of $1,113.49. Overall earnings estimates have been revised higher since the company's last earnings release. Option traders are pricing in a 8.3% move on earnings and the stock has averaged a 5.1% move in recent quarters.
Kohl's Corporation (KSS) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 7:00 AM ET on Tuesday, March 3, 2020. The consensus earnings estimate is $1.92 per share on revenue of $6.80 billion and the Earnings Whisper ® number is $1.91 per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 40% expecting an earnings beat. Consensus estimates are for earnings to decline year-over-year by 14.29% with revenue decreasing by 0.34%. Short interest has decreased by 2.6% since the company's last earnings release while the stock has drifted lower by 19.7% from its open following the earnings release to be 19.9% below its 200 day moving average of $48.86. Overall earnings estimates have been revised lower since the company's last earnings release. On Monday, February 24, 2020 there was some notable buying of 809 contracts of the $40.00 put expiring on Friday, March 20, 2020. Option traders are pricing in a 11.7% move on earnings and the stock has averaged a 9.5% move in recent quarters.
Splunk Inc. (SPLK) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 4:00 PM ET on Wednesday, March 4, 2020. The consensus earnings estimate is $0.96 per share on revenue of $783.94 million and the Earnings Whisper ® number is $1.00 per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 91% expecting an earnings beat The company's guidance was for revenue of approximately $780.00 million. Consensus estimates are for year-over-year earnings growth of 31.51% with revenue increasing by 26.02%. Short interest has increased by 2.1% since the company's last earnings release while the stock has drifted higher by 9.1% from its open following the earnings release to be 10.8% above its 200 day moving average of $132.95. Overall earnings estimates have been revised lower since the company's last earnings release. On Wednesday, February 26, 2020 there was some notable buying of 2,414 contracts of the $155.00 call expiring on Friday, March 6, 2020. Option traders are pricing in a 13.0% move on earnings and the stock has averaged a 8.6% move in recent quarters.
Dollar Tree Stores, Inc. (DLTR) is confirmed to report earnings at approximately 7:30 AM ET on Wednesday, March 4, 2020. The consensus earnings estimate is $1.75 per share on revenue of $6.39 billion and the Earnings Whisper ® number is $1.75 per share. Investor sentiment going into the company's earnings release has 61% expecting an earnings beat The company's guidance was for earnings of $1.70 to $1.80 per share. Consensus estimates are for earnings to decline year-over-year by 9.33% with revenue increasing by 2.98%. Short interest has decreased by 7.1% since the company's last earnings release while the stock has drifted lower by 13.3% from its open following the earnings release to be 17.9% below its 200 day moving average of $101.15. Overall earnings estimates have been revised lower since the company's last earnings release. On Wednesday, February 26, 2020 there was some notable buying of 3,974 contracts of the $85.00 call expiring on Friday, March 20, 2020. Option traders are pricing in a 9.0% move on earnings and the stock has averaged a 7.9% move in recent quarters.
I was signing autographs in a downtown Richmond book boutique when Henry came in. I had been there for over four hours, sitting at a folding table scribbling my name on the inside covers of endless copies of Night Terrors, and was exhausted. My arm ached and my head throbbed. Meeting a perpetual flow of fans, many of them gushing, is hell to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love them dearly, but social situations tend to repel me, and actually engaging people I don’t know is an awkward near impossibility. It was nearing one, dark and nasty without, and I was longing for a nice long nap in my hotel room when Henry’s turn came. I thought that the woman before him, a middle-aged blond in a brown leather jacket, would never leave. But thankfully Mr. Preston, the owner of the shop, ushered her away in his prissy manner. I smiled at the man whom I did not recognize as Henry. He was tall and pale, his wavy black hair limp and lusterless, the flesh of his face tight and his eyes an unhealthy pink which bespoke sleepless nights. He smiled wearily yet warmly. Without a word he passed me his copy of Night Terrors. “And how are you today?” I asked as I sat the book down, my blue Sharpie pen, the second one of the day, poised. “Just peachy,” he croaked, and I at once knew the voice. I looked up, and Henry was still grinning as if through pain. “Henry!” I cried happily, and extended my hand. He took it, and it was like a block of ice. I and Henry were like brothers since time out of mind; our parents were high school friends who lived next to each other in the Pickett subdivision on Thomas Street, and from diapers we were always together, on play dates, camping trips, and backyard pool parties. We were inseparable all through our school years, and only parted, tearfully and grudgingly, when I left Picketts Meade to study at UVA in 1997. Since then, we had seen very little of each other, as I lived mostly in New York City and he in the house willed to him by his childless aunt and uncle. “Hey, man,” he said, “what’s goin on?” “Not much,” I said, “same old stuff. Working and all that. What about you?” He shrugged. “Same here, pretty much. Listen, are you free this afternoon?” “Sure, what’s up?” “I got a ghost,” he said, as though the words were kidney stones. “Sure, I’d be happy to come by.” Henry smiled again. “Thanks. You know where my aunt’s old place is, right?” “Ahhh, no, I forgot.” “Okay, here.” Henry pulled out his wallet and opened it. In the translucent slot where preening fathers proudly put pictures of their children, there was a faded Polaroid of two boys, one tall and skinny, the other short and fat, at a lake on a summer day in 1988, mugging it up with their arms thrown around the other’s shoulder. I had the same one in my wallet. Henry produced a small piece of creased paper and, with my pen, jotted down the directions. “I’ll be there at around four or so,” I said, sticking the paper into my blazer’s breast pocket. “Thanks a million, man, I can’t tell you the kinda shit I been goin through.” “I can imagine.” “Good book; is it number one?” I snickered. “Ahead of Glenn Beck? I wish.” Henry shrugged. “Still a classic. I can’t believe some of the shit. All of it’s real?” “As you and I,” I replied. I jotted down my name and a small, personal message onto the inside cover, and handed it back to Henry. “I’ll see you,” he said. “I’ll be there,” I responded with a smile. *** Almost two hours later I left the bookstore by the back door, emerged into a narrow ally of grimy brick walls, and carefully crept toward busy 5thstreet. Above, the sky was malevolently silent. Before leaving the relative safety of the alley, I looked both ways along the sidewalk, and found it empty save for several rushing, bundled forms. For a moment I was reminded of those old shots of The Beatles running from mad throngs of screaming women through the streets of London, and smiled. I stepped into a freezing gust and hurried up the sidewalk, passing drab storefronts darkened by the gloomy afternoon light. A Ford Focus passed by on the street in a splash of puddled rain, its red taillights glowing satanically in the mist. Ahead, a brave hotdog vendor, possibly a transplanted New Yorker, stood tensely behind his cart, ready to feed the world. He offered me a taste of his wares, and the almost desperate imploring of his voice touched me. Imagining poverty and mounting bills, I bought a small fountain Coke even though I wasn’t thirsty, and almost as soon as I was out of sight I cast the cup into a metal trash bin, the clanking ice cubes within having sapped the heat from my hand. Slowly the scenery bled into one of the residential. Dirty Brownstone tenements marched dismally into the ashen day, their crumbling stoops guarded by rusted metal sentries overflowing with rank refuse. I finally came to the small lot where I had left my Jeep in-between a pick-up truck and a hatchback. The latter was gone, replaced by a small red Beetle. I fished the keys from my pocket and opened the driver side door. Behind the wheel, I started the engine and the radio came to life with one bland Taylor Swift song or another. Before leaving I slipped Krokus’ Change of Address into the CD player, and slowly cruised back the way I had come. Several minutes later I took a sloping onramp and met the babbling interstate; before I joined the flow I waited for several large Mac trucks to scream by in their shrouds of water mist. The meager Richmond skyline stretched away to the east, interrupted only by the wide river which bisects the city. Maybe it was the mood and light of the afternoon, but the city seemed a deserted necropolis, the buildings bizarre Druid ruins rising black against the sky. Once on the interstate I noticed that several idiots cars next to mine were busy blabbering into their cell-phones or texting. I’m not the kind of guy who wants to ban this and that, or the kind of asshole who preaches his opinion to everybody, but I know what can happen on a freeway when someone wants to whip out the old Droid and chat. One girl, with wet black hair and dressed in a loose white t-shirt, flipped me off when I motioned hang up and drive. Women, I thought with a grin, they taste good…but the heartburn! I soon took rural Exit 154 and coasted into the parking lot of a small roadside gas station fed by a narrow hillside lane. I pulled under the gas-pump shelter and killed Marc Storace in the middle of Burning up the Night. I searched my hip pocket and checked the directions again. The name of the town was Fairfield, not too far north of the city. I got out into the damp and filled the jeep up with juice, wincing at the price. With that done, I crossed the open space between the pumps and the store, my hair dampening, and entered. After waiting for a white man in a mossy oak camo cap to buy a six pack of Bud Ice and a black woman to purchase a pack of condoms and tampons (an ungodly mix, if you ask me), it came my turn. The wispy old man behind the counter, wearing country regulation suspenders over his button up work shirt, studied me for a long moment. “Hey, you’re that writer fella, aintcha?” he asked with a rough smile, revealing that his teeth were mostly black or tarnished gold. Despite a swelling of pride in my chest, I wanted desperately to avoid an embarrassing scene. “No.” “Hm. You look a lot like ‘im. She loves all that damn ghost huntin’ garbage.” I paid for the gas, and the old man wished me a good afternoon with a crooked grin. Once back in my car, I again studied the directions, trying to absorb them so that I wouldn’t have to constantly consult them in transit. Feeling confident that I could make it on my own, I started up the engine and followed the ascending byway toward Fairfield. I soon left behind all urban pretense and found myself speeding through low hills and tiny hamlets made up of slanted wood structures decades past their prime. It had begun to rain more steadily. Crossing the murky Roman River, I saw that it had overflowed its banks. The winding lane took me past yet more hilly farmland enclosed by strands of barbed wire, putting me slightly in mind of northern England. When I came to the outer limits of Fairfield, which sat across another, smaller, swollen river, I was greeted by a white board sign proclaiming it as The Nicest Town in America. Main Street, lined with gray brick shops dating from the 1920s, sank down into the rest of the town, from which a white church spire rose into the air, and a blue water tower next to a tall brick schoolhouse loomed supernaturally forth from the thick valley mist. The sidewalk boasted fiery trees, the embers of which carpeted the wet concrete. At the four-way intersection, the only cars that I met were a station wagon going to the east part of town, a minivan heading back the way I had come, and an SUV going down into the heart of the town, which lied spread before the hill like a fog enshrouded dream. I took the left and followed the street for a time, passing a small doctor’s office and the police station. The big roll-top doors of the local volunteer fire department were open, and I glimpsed several men in the gloom lazily wiping down the sleeping green dragon within. A group of children struggled down the sidewalk with crammed backpacks dragging along the wet pavement. A boy on a ten-speed bike shot past them and hung a sharp right, taking a small dead-end road ending at the foot of the hill. In the rear view mirror a large yellow school grinded to a halt, the red lights on its mounted stop sign blinking rhythmically. Teenagers tumbled out and hurried across. Lee Street was an odd mix of ranch and Victorian houses, all beautiful and tastefully enclosed by hedges or withering gardens. A few of the larger homes were sectioned off with low stone walls waist high to a man. The last house on the left was tall and narrow, dating back at least to the latter half of the 1890s. With spires and gingerbread trim it affected a stately air. I parked along the street and sat for a moment, memories washing over me. I and Henry had come here several summers during our childhood. Being unable to have children, Jo and Oscar doted on us so much it was almost cloying. They were rabid antique collectors, and spent thirty happy years hoarding history together before Flight 93 went down over Pennsylvania on the eleventh of September, 2001. I killed the engine and got out into a brisk slap of wind. After waiting for a minivan to swoosh past, I crossed the street. The grass along the flagstone walk was encroachingly tall, and I wondered if Henry’s ghost had hidden his lawnmower. I bounded up the porch and knocked on the door. I waited in the cold for a moment, a wind from the west raking my flesh. Finally, as I cocked my fist to knock again, the door opened, and was filled with Henry, dressed as he had been at the bookstore. “Hey, man” he greeted and moved aside. “Long time no see,” I smiled. Stepping across the threshold, I was immediately struck by the heaviness of the atmosphere, crushing down on me like the world upon Atlas’s shoulders. I staggered, and Henry at one grabbed my arm and helped steady me. “Uh-oh,” he said, “I don’t like that.” “I’m fine,” I lied, looking suspiciously about myself, “just tired.” I didn’t at once remember what such a black heft meant, but I did know that it wasn’t good. At all. “Well, if you wanna go back…” “Nah,” I dismissed, “I’m alright.” “Okay,” Henry said and led me from the shadowy foyer and into a wide parlor. A large bay window, an ugly modern addition, sat across the room, uncurtained. Save for tall, dusty bookshelves along either wall, the only other furnishings in the room were a couch piled with tangled blankets and a pillow, and two armchairs. Henry showed me to one of the chairs and took the one across from me. “So, what’s up? How’s life treating you?” I sighed. “Alright. I hate the touring, though. I can’t stand being on the road.” “Ah,” he dismissed me with a wave of the hand, “you always were a little homebody. I love the open road. Nothing like it. You want a drink?” I nodded. “Coke,” he warned me. “Better be.” He laughed and moved off to the kitchen, leaving me alone in the room. The dark feeling pressed down on me harder than it had been, compressing my chest. I tried to take a deep breath, but was unable. It was like standing on a high butte overlooking a strange plain in a dark world, the air thin and sour. Henry returned with two Cokes. He handed me one and sat back down. “Sorry they’re not cold. I just bought ‘em on the way back.” “That’s fine,” I said, opening mine and taking a long drink. Henry sat his between his legs. “I saw you on Ghost Hunters last month,” he said with something like pride, “I was over at my old girlfriend’s house and when your mug popped out, I about went crazy. “Hey, I know that guy!”” My appearance on the popular SYFY Channel show had been little more than a publicity stunt engineered by my agent. I was against it from the first, but ending up going on anyway. The target was a 13th Century castle on an Irish bluff overlooking the crashing sea. Supposedly, a family of werewolves had lived there in the sixteen hundreds. “They’re a sham,” I said, glancing around as if expecting a hostile apparition to materialize. Maybe I was. “Who?” “Those attention whores,” I said, referring to the ‘ghost hunters’. “There weren’t any ghosts. It was all faked. The noises. The mist. All of it. “I figured,” Henry said, “they usually are.” “I guess,” I looked around. “Yeah.” Henry finished off his Coke and sat the empty can at his foot. “So, what have you been doing?” I asked, “just hanging out?” “Yeah,” he said, “aunt Jo and uncle Oscar weren’t rich. They had money, but not much. The way the recession’s going, I’m probably gonna have to go back to work soon.” “Sometimes I wish I could just stop writing and investigating and all that and just live off my books’ proceeds,” I confided, “live the life without doing the work.” Henry chuckled. “You’re lucky; you got a kick-ass job. I’m most likely gonna end up at Food-Lion or something.” “Gotta start somewhere,” I said. “Maybe we can write a novel together.” Both of us had tried as children to write our own horror stories. Henry’s were mostly better than mine. “Maybe,” he seemed to taste the idea. I opened my mouth to reply, but a stiff gust of wind slammed into the house, and I jolted. Henry laughed. “Scared?” I shook my head. “No, not really. I just…well, what exactly are we dealing with, here?” Henry sobered, his face darkening. “I…I been thinking how to word this for a while now.” He paused. “You ever hear that phrase La petite mort?” I missed a beat. “What?” “You know, that French metaphor? It refers to a state of euphoria after you “finish.”” “Yeah, I know.” Henry sat grasping for a moment. “People believe that some kind of spiritual lifeforce is…expelled when you cum. Somehow that’s like dying or something.” “Uh-huh,” I nodded awkwardly. “And in Ghosts and Ghouls, you said that some people think a ghost is just…leftover human energy. Right?” “The atheists and agnostics in the field, yes.” “Do you think it’s possible that…that release of energy can leave a…a ghostly residue?” I laughed. “Henry, that’s just a metaphor; it doesn’t mean anything.” “Are you sure?” I opened my mouth, but closed it again. I couldn’t honestly say that I was. “What…what makes you ask that?” “It’s my bed,” he replied darkly. “Your bed?” He nodded. “Remember Sarah Kerns?” For a moment I drew a blank, and then an angular face framed in raven hair materialized before my mind’s eye. “Sure,” I said, “your girlfriend in eighth grade. What about her?” “Remember how she moved over the summer, before we started high school?” I nodded. Her father was in some kind of business that forced him to relocate often. I can’t remember what it was, though. “The night before she left, she came over to my house and we did it...” “Alright,” I urged, and then it dawned on me. “You still have the same bed, don’t you?” He shrugged. “Never saw a good reason to get rid of it.” “And you’ve…done a lot in it, huh?” “A lot,” he admitted. “And now you think…what, all that combined energy has created a sort of ghost?” “Look, I know it’s crazy, but just hear me out, okay?” “Okay.” Henry took a deep breath and began. Several weeks before crying out to me for help, he told me, he had been lying awake in bed. It was a windy night and he was as far from sleep as a man can get, so, as he watched the darkened ceiling, he let his mind drift unfettered. He had always had a fertile imagination, and was entertaining himself with undisclosed fantasies when, all of a sudden, the foot of the bed lurched to one side, as though booted by an angry WWE star after an in-ring betrayal. “Man, that scared the shit outta me,” Henry said. “I froze up and just laid there for a minute. Then it happened again, and this time I got knocked off.” Frightened, Henry jumped up, fell in the sheets tangled at his feet, and flew down the stairs. “I sat here in the living room for a little while. After a half hour or so, I decided it was a nightmare and went back up. In the room, I flipped on the light switch and…” He was quiet for a long moment, looking down at his ashen hands. “And there was a fuckin dead girl spread out on the bed, covered in blood and shit.” I gasped softly at this, my heart freezing in mid beat. “You’re sure?” I asked incredulously. He nodded without looking up. “Yeah. And she looked like Hanna Giles…you remember her, right?” I did. She was a cheerleader during school, a tall drink of blond perfection. She and Henry spent much of the 11th grade getting hot and heavy together before he grew bored and found another conquest. “And…and she…sat up, her fuckin eyes were black and she had these long Dracula fangs. She opened up her legs and…fucking blood gushed out.” He stopped at my hiss of horror. “It looked like…you know, in The Shinning, when that elevator opens up in the beginning?” I nodded, my mouth slightly agape. “I saw that shit and lost my mind. I ran out the front door and down the street. Spent the rest of the night in a booth at the diner, too afraid to come home.” In the morning, Henry stretched out in the parlor. “I was having dinner the next day. A buffalo chicken Hungry Man. So, I was sitting at the kitchen table eating, when something above my head, in the room, crashed against the floor. And right after, I heard this long, high pitched laugh.” Stiff with terror, Henry remained unmoving at the table for nearly an hour before packing up and going to a motel for a few days. “I was starting to think it was a nightmare, but when that shit happened…” Henry eventually returned, convinced that the “ghosts”, while frightening, were harmless. “So, one night, I got brave and went back upstairs to see what would happen.” After several uneventful hours, Henry was on the border of sleep when something, something cold and dry, wrapped around his throat. “It felt like hands, little…you know, a woman’s hands.” The world grayed as Henry clawned at the phantom hands to no avail. He nearly collapsed into death before they suddenly and inexplicably spared him. “That was the other night. I was about to leave, go get a motel or something, but I heard you were coming down, so I thought I’d see if you could help me.” For a long moment I sat in brooding silence. In 1999, I left school to work for a noted regional paranormal researcher named John Haggis. I accompanied him on many outings, most of them busts. Only three confirmed cases of the genuinely supernatural came across our desk in the three years I worked with him, one of them being the demonic haunting of a bar in Headwaters, a tiny hamlet nestled in the Shenandoah foothills southwest of Harrisonburg. I learned several things from our experience there. One: Demons despise the presence of a professional. Two: While ghosts can, on extremely rare occasions, possess human beings, only demons can shapeshift and actually harm someone without the use of a human agent. “Have…have you ever smelled sulfur here?” I asked, my voice natural, at least to my own ears. “Rotten eggs? No, why?” “You’ve been left alone outside the room, right?” “Yeah. What about the sulfur?” he seemed impatient. I ignored him and looked from one shadowy corner to another, the house bathed in a sour, uneasy silence. I was shocked to find myself wanting to get as away from the house as I could. “Henry,” I drew, my eyes darting apprehensively, “there…” I stopped. How would he take hearing that a demon was in his house? But was it really a demon we were dealing with? I couldn’t be sure; I’m not, after all, a demonologist. “What?” he asked, his tone low and worried. If it was, then it appeared to be attached to the bed somehow, like a ghost to a favorite rocking chair… “…I doubt that your ghost is made of girl goo.” I at length flashed a smile, hoping that it didn’t look too fake. “I’ve heard of similar cases, and they are relatively easy to deal with.” “Really?” Henry’s face brightened for the first time all day, and his tone was one of a child in the presence of a shyster birthday-party magician. “Yeah,” I said, “no problem. Tomorrow I’ll call some people and they’ll conduct…sort of an exorcism. It’ll be a breeze.” Henry sighed, relieved. “Okay.” I looked again from corner to corner. “Hey, you want to go and get some dinner, my treat?” Henry smiled again, his dark eyes alight. “Sure.” We took my car, and drove off into the thickening gloom. Main Street was busier than it had been when I entered town; it was past six, and people were returning home from work in droves. “Take a left up here,” Henry said as we approached the four-way, “and go for about…five miles. Place called Ryan’s.” I nodded, lost in thought. I would have to call Tom Youngblood, the only demonologist in the Richmond area, in the morning. And maybe I would have to call the Catholic Church in town, too. Then again, the church has tried in recent years to distance itself from the supernatural. I took the left, and descended down into the heart of Fairfield. Queerly, about a mile of hillside between the upper and lower sections had been left undeveloped, and was currently a hopeless tangle of dead grass. “Man, I feel like a weight’s been lifted,” Henry said as we passed the dark shops and rain sluiced sidewalks, empty save for the phantom trees along the edge. “You can really do all of this tomorrow?” “Yeah,” I said confidently. I took a deep breath, and seemed to blow away all of the mounting worry crushing my chest. I only had to call Tom and a priest, and they would take it from there. They were experts. It might not be an easy break, but it would get done. Demons were actually weak in the presence of religious men; which is why I abandoned my former atheism. “Good. I can’t wait to get this shit behind me. It’s been a living hell, you know?” I nodded, and then realized that it was probably too dark for Henry to see. “Yeah, I bet it’ll feel really good.” “Like a million bucks,” Henry said. “And…get rid of the damn bed. I don’t think that what we’re dealing with is…what you thought, but just burn it. It’s possible that the ghost is attached to it for some reason.” “Way ahead of you, man,” Henry said. “I’m gonna go down to Mattress Warehouse and get me a new one tomorrow.” At the end of town, just before the beginning of the dark, wet woods, I slowed at the traffic light, pulling to a stop alongside a school bus; the small lights affixed to the ceiling within were on against the dark. I saw a few dark silhouettes through the rectangular windows, and ascertained from their distorted shapes that they belonged to the high school’s football team. “And…don’t have all your fun in one place, okay?” I said as we got back underway, the bus falling behind in the darkness. “I ain’t gonna have that kinda fun for a long time.” “Yeah, bullshit,” I jested in hopes of further lightening the mood, “you can’t go a week without having sex with someone…or something.” Henry chuckled. “Yeah? I once went a month without doin your mom.” “She needed that long to stop laughing at your…handicap.” Henry laughed. “Okay. Just wait till we get there; take you in the bathroom and show you what’s up.” I snorted. “What’s limp.” “It won’t be limp when I shove it down…” The restaurant, a sparkling oasis cloaked in primal black, loomed so quickly from the darkness that I nearly missed the turn. “Alright,” Henry said after I had slid us into a slanted parking spot facing the empty road, his penis forgotten, “let’s get some grub.” “You look like a German Jew,” I said as we got out of the car, “you need a good meal.” “Yeah, thanks, mom,” Henry said as we crossed the parking lot. Through the big front windows, we could see happy families sharing joyful meals in the warm brightness. We came to the double doors, and both held them open for the shuffling passage of an elderly couple. “Thank you,” the old man rasped and nodded as he helped his wife past us and toward a silver Cadillac parked in one of the closest handicap spots. They were immediately followed by two teenage girls in gym shorts and pink tops. “What is it with kids dressing like that when it’s cold?” I whispered as we entered the restaurant, assaulted at once by the good odors of many steaming, mingling foods. “If you got it flaunt it,” Henry reckoned. We walked up to the long lunch counter and took cups, silverware and plastic trays from a hotplate guarded from inconsiderate sneezers by smudged plastic. We waited behind a party of rowdy college students to pay the casher. We paid the chipper blond behind the register and were shown by a young sleepy eyed man in a red t-shirt and black slacks to a booth along the far wall of the room, mercifully away from the main population. Henry was immediately off to fix himself a plate at the buffet. I sat at the booth for a moment, looking around the brightly lit room. It was crowded with families, mostly, passing food and laughing over their tables. After another moment of inventorying how many people I would have to pass to get to the drink machine, I got up and moved to the Coke island. Apart from the dispenser there sat a plain metal canister marked with the picture of a tall, frosty glass of chocolate milk looming forward like a favorite uncle. I considered for a moment, and finally decided to get the milk, the likes of which I haven’t tasted since I was a child. As I drew the dark liquid into my clear cup, a beefy older man in a brown leather jacket walked unthinkingly up to the machine and filled his cup with Sprite, all the while gasping softly to himself about someone named Mony-Mony. Sidestepping a yellow WET FLOOR sign at the head of a nasty spill, I went back to the booth where Henry sat, bent protectively over a plate of fried chicken and breaded shrimp. I took my plate and quickly filled it up with French fries, several times nearly colliding with a young boy in small glasses examining each bright pile of food as if he would die if he did not detect the poison on his choices. At the booth I splattered a liberal amount of Tabasco sauce on the golden potatoes and dug in, my chocolate milk standing dutifully by should I need its aid. “Remember Donny West?” Henry asked around a mouthful of food. I nodded. Donny had been one of our friends as kids before his mother moved the family to West Virginia. A beefy kid with red hair and deep freckles. “Yeah. How can I forget?” “He died.” “What?” I asked, a bit of fry falling from my mouth and landing on the plate. Henry nodded and swallowed. “I talked to his sister on Facebook, and she said he was drinking and wrecked his car into a tree a couple years ago. Took two of his friends with him.” “That’s horrible,” I said numbly. Though I had not seen Donny in years, to hear that a once close friend was dead broke my heart. “You remember what he did on April Fool’s Day that one time?” I asked Henry after a long, respectful moment of silence. Henry nodded. “He had balls to do that.” Donny, much more a practical joker than even Henry, had run the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy up the flag pole before school started that day. What made it even funnier were the facts that no one even noticed until lunch, and that the school sat right on the main highway in Picketts Meade. “Yeah,” I sighed, black, cancerous nostalgia flooding me. “The good old days.” We then lapsed into a comfortable silence. After savagely stripping the meat from a chicken bone, Henry wandered off to treat himself to a cold dessert. I finished the last of my fries and polished off the chocolate milk, my burning mouth greedily absorbing the cool liquid. After a return trip to the machine, meeting once again the boy who had been diligently studying for his buffet safety PhD (he wasn’t quiet as conscientious when it came to Coca-Cola), I placed myself in my seat and awaited Henry. He soon returned empty-handed. “They all sucked,” he declared. I did not reply, but suddenly realized that the ice cream machine was next to the soda and chocolate milk fountains. Suddenly, from across the room, there came a loud racket, drawling the puzzled stares of patrons in the gulf between walls. From a door came a line of people dressed in red shirts and black pants. The person at the head of the rank, a rather fetching teen goth with long midnight hair and a generous bosom, held something in her hands, something aflame, for her strong angler face was awash in orange. The Ryan’s troops behind her were clapping. With mortification I saw them making a B-line toward our table like a personified children’s show choo-choo. Now all of the bemused eaters were looking toward me and Henry. “You bastard,” I said, turning to Henry. He was smiling and clapping flourishingly. I broke out in my own grin, my cheeks afire. “Oh you son of a bitch; real funny.” The Ryan’s Birthday Army now surrounded my half of the booth, leering over me like grinning psychos and clapping madly. I hung my head in embarrassment as they sat a flaming birthday cake on the table before me. “Bastard,” I muttered, lowering my head, realizing that now all of the other patrons too were looking at me and clapping. Then the singing started. I could just imagine Henry going up to our hostess and stage whispering across the counter, his hand shielding his mouth from prying lip readers, Pissst; it’s his birthday, pointing in my direction. Bastard. *** Coming out of the Ryan’s parking lot nearly half an hour later, I took a right on the rain swept street and followed it back to town past several large comfortable southern homes boasting screened in front porches and spotlighted flags. Most of these were protected from the street by rusted chin link fences. We were silent and content, our stomachs full. Finally desirous of breaking the silence, but too stuffed with food and lazy to speak, I switched on the radio, picking up a station from southern Maryland. After a “local” newscast about a New York mobster choking to death in a King George pizza joint and the discovery of a well-known radical poet shot dead in a D.C. parking garage, Cyndi Lauper came on with Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. “Your song,” Henry croaked from the passenger seat. I changed the station. The Culture Club was singing about a Church of the Poisoned Mind. “Damn, must be your night,” Henry snickered from the darkness. “Shut up,” I replied, hitting the scan button; the radio settled for a station playing a Seether song. Henry laughed. “I meant you like eighties music. I wasn’t trying to say you’re gay…not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Pulling to the end of Henry’s street, I noticed that we had left none of the lights on when we departed; the thought of waltzing through the door into the pitch black slightly uneased me. I thought of asking Henry to stay with me at the Marriot in Richmond rather than me staying with him, but quickly decided against it; we’d be safe in the parlor. Putting down my own childish reluctance, I parked the car at the curb and killed the engine, shutting Kanye West off in mid-rant. We entered the house and immediately repaired to the parlor, where Henry took care of stoking a warm fire into existence. That done, he came back to his chair and sank with a pleasured sigh. “So, you gonna write about this?” To be honest, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. “Maybe,” I said. Of course I would. Would it make it into my next book? It had a better chance than some of the other cases I had. People love their supernatural when it’s really weird. “Well…” Henry said, but was interrupted by a terrible crash from overhead, which shook the house and caused us to jerk in surprised fear. “There it is,” he shivered. Another long bang sounded upstairs, as if something had thumped to the floor. I swallowed around a lump in my throat, and opened my mouth, but was forestalled by another loud crash, this one followed by a stomach-piercing moan. “Maybe we should go,” I stammered, a sudden bubble of stark fear overwhelming my cool rationality. Henry licked his lips and swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. I looked appraisingly up at the smooth ceiling above my head, partly hidden by the gloom. There was another thump that stopped my heart and froze my blood. A shower of fine plaster rained down upon me like hard snow, and I quickly averted my eyes to avoid it. “Henry?” I panted breathlessly, wrestling with my own galloping fear. “Fuck this,” Henry affirmed and moved to stand, “let’s…” Henry had been whispering, as if worried about disturbing his inconsiderate guest, so I was able to hear the soft, terrible footfall. It was as if an electric shock ran through me, reducing my bones to jelly. I heard it again, louder this time. Henry’s eyes were wide. “Was that…?” he whispered superstitiously. I gulped and nodded. “It sounded like it… From the dark upstairs hall there came a soft, fugitive creak. Henry was now fully standing, his wiry body tense and rigid. “Hennnryyyyyy!” drifted a thin and ghostly greeting. “Jesus Christ!” I exclaimed, and bolted to my feet. I turned to the dark threshold into the rest of the hostile house, and saw nothing but playing shadows. “Hennnryyyy, baaaabyyyyyyy!” I spun on my heels. “We have to get the hell out of here!” I whispered incoherently, my mind reeling. There was no hope of using the front door. We would have to pass the stairs… Henry stood slack in place, his eyes wide and seeming to vibrate with terror. There was a more confident footfall from halfway down the staircase, and a definite swish like that of a passing priest’s cassock. “Come on!” I screamed, my fear boiling over. I desperately regarded the window beyond Henry’s chair. It appeared wide enough for both of us to escape side-by-side. I grabbed Henry’s wrist, but pulling him was like trying to move a wooden post set deeply in the ground. “Come on, we gotta go, NOW!!” I screamed franticly, hearing the loud moan of the last step. Henry shook his head as if shaking away a dream and looked at me with frightened, pleading eyes. But before a word could pass between us he turned back to the threshold. And screamed. Hearing the horrible, damned-soul quality of his voice broke my resolve and nearly my mind. It was the high-pitched shriek of a child on finally seeing the thing under its bed and finding it far worse than imagined; it was the scream of a sinner being shown into his new abode in hell; it was the pitiful cry of a madman. Fueled by mindless animal terror, I sprang for the window. Forearms thrown protectively over my face, I crashed through with a cry, and sailed into the damp night in a shower of broken glass, my stomach throbbing in my throat. I hit the grassy ground with an umph and staggered to my feet, my knees watery and quivering. Behind me, the laughter of madness turned into the orgasm of agony.
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