Putting more Banksters in charge.

That seems to be the direction things are going now that the Top 1% have taken over every aspect of our lives.  In addition to consolidating their hold on our Government, the media continues to consolidate as Sinclair Broadcasting (SBGI) is taking over Tribune Media (TRCO) in a $4Bn deal making Sinclair now the single largest owner of US local TV stations (where you get your news).  

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Sincleair is controlled by the Smith Family, with all 4 sons of Julian Smith serving as Executive Directors and David Smith is the CEO – a real family affair.  Sinclair is famous for broadcasting "Stolen Honor," a propaganda documentary that falsely accused John Kerry of causing prisoners of war to be mistreated right before the election – pre-empting their prime-time programming across the country in order to influence the election.  

When Sinclair's Washington Bureau Chief, Jon Lieberman criticized the broadcast, saying: "It's biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election … For me, it's not about right or left—it's about what's right or wrong in news coverage this close to an election," he was fired.  In 2010, Sinclair aired another "informercial" critical of Barack Obama claiming, among other ridiculously untrue things, that Obama had said "You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You gonna have to kill some of those babies."

That's right, all this quality programming will soon be coming to a station near you.  In fact, in December 2016,  Jared Kushner, son-in-law of then-President-elect Donald Trump, stated that they had reached deals with Sinclair to give the company extended access to the Trump campaign, in exchange for airing, without further commentary, interviews with the Republican Party candidate on its stations, which Kushner said had a better reach than cable networks such as CNN.  Trump's FCC has now changed broadcast anti-monopoly rules to allow Sinclair to complete this mega-merger. 

There's nothing we can do about it really and there's nothing I can say that wasn't said 40 years ago – and no one listened then and look what happened to us:  

Not to be outdone (or outgunned) in the race to control your mind, Comcast (CMCSA) and Charter (CHTR) are forming a partnership to control the wireless airwaves.  Between that and the Net Neutrality changes at the FCC, it will be interesting to see who has more control over who gets to wash your brain going forward – the few remaining content providers like Sinclair or the Companies that control the airwaves themselves like CHTR and CMCS and don't forget Google (GOOGL), because you really don't even know something exists if Google doesn't show it to you, right?  

Speaking of mergers and acquisitions, on August 11th, we talked about Kate Spade (KATE) as our favorite bargain stock in the retail space and our trade idea was:

This morning it was announced that KATE will be acquired by Coach (COH) for $18.50 per share, which will close our our spread at $3,500 with a $3,950 profit (877%) including the net credit we began with and that's going to drop another $2,225 in our Options Opportunity Portfolio, where the trade was only showing a net value of $1,125 as of Friday's close:

Making 877% in 9 months is as good as making the full 1,211% in 16 months, as was originally planned.  This weekend, in our Live Member Chat Room, I put up a similar style trade idea for Fiat/Chrysler (FCAU) who, at just $11.37, have a $17Bn market cap, about 1/3 of Tesla's (TSLA), even though FCAU sold $117Bn worth of cars last year vs $7Bn for Tesla (16.7 times more) and even though FCAU made a $2Bn profit vs TSLA's $680M loss (4x more – and that's being generous).  Despite the obvious shortcomings, TSLA has a $50Bn market cap – about 3 times FCAU.  

Now that's just stupid and we're already short TSLA so our long trade idea for FCAU (which I'll discuss live at the Nasdaq this morning) is:

I know it "only" returns 233% on cash but the low VIX makes it much harder to find good spreads like we had for KATE and, by the way, the options market in general is suffering from a liquitidy crunch – so be very careful getting involved with thinly traded options!