End of Their World

09/11/13 07:47AM EDT

This note was originally published September 10, 2013 at 07:58 in Early Look

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come."

-Victor Hugo

I’ve spent many early mornings this year attempting to objectively contemplate the end of the world. Despite the Nasdaq (+23% YTD) closing at a fresh YTD high yesterday, on every downtick in US growth stocks everyone and their brother has been worried about it – and there have been big fear-based advertising businesses built on it. How some people get paid is serious stuff.

Our Big Macro Idea in 2013 (that the world wouldn’t end) has drawn the ire of everyone, from the old-boy financial media network, to the newbie ad-platform from parts unknown (Zero Hedge). Many of you have seen the comments they chose to flog in public – in Twitter, on TV, in the press.  Only a very few of us have seen the ugliness of some of the emails some of these characters have sent me.  Least said, soonest mended (word to the wise…)

We will continue to power forward with an idea whose time has come – a transparent, accountable, and trustworthy independent research platform that has zero conflicts of interest. We have no banking, trading, or advertising revenues to pander to. We aren’t banned from the securities industry either, like some of our snottier critics. We’re right where we want to be - standing in the arena of meritocratic debate.

Back to the Global Macro Grind

Today is what we call an Event Day @Hedgeye, because we are hosting one of our Best Idea Conference Calls on what we believe is a significantly overvalued company called Kinder Morgan. For those of you who follow either our written research from Energy sector all-star Kevin Kaiser or my #RealTimeAlerts, you’ll know we’ve been bearish in both print and #timestamped KMP short sales since the beginning of August.

For the end of the world community that somehow hasn’t called the short side of things that actually go down in 2013 (like Gold, Bonds, or Linn Energy – another short idea from Kaiser), this whole event day thing drives them right squirrel. How dare a “young” and up and coming research and risk management firm interrupt their navel gazing?

Admittedly, I’ve only been making short calls for about 15 years, so I may not know as much as the clients who pay for our work. Every morning of my market life, I wake up assuming that I need to learn something. It’s not my job to assume we’re going to be right – it’s to try to prove myself wrong.

The #OldWall and its media outlets have a different model – they know everything about everything, 5 miles wide and an inch deep:

From our Wall St 2.0 friends at Seeking Alpha > Kinder Morgan Energy Partners (KMP): "There is an outfit that is trying to get this thing down. They are calling it a house of cards. Richard Kinder (the CEO), come on this show. I know they are going to (do) a massive hit job on you. If you want to be able to tell your story, Mad Money welcomes you. This is a stock I like." –Jim Cramer

Mr. Cramer got nowhere with his Sound and Fury in our last public debate – which descended into members of the Old-Boy network trying to suggest we were committing a securities violation with our research call on Linn Energy (LINN).  One has to admire the conviction the man brings to the table today, on what looks like a replay of the same tape. Occasionally wrong, never in doubt.

Whether you’re a media talking head trying to drive advertising revenues, an Old Wall firm that’s banking one of Kinder’s deals, or just a portfolio manger flat out chasing dividend yield because you have to – it’s all cool with us. So is doing our own work on an idea whose time has come.

For those of you who think it’s a big positive that Rich Kinder “bought stock” in KMI here are a few research nuggets to consider as you contextualize that headline:

  1. Kinder bought 500,000 shares = $18M worth of stock = increasing his stake by 0.2%
  2. Kinder holds 241,000,000 shares of KMI = $8.8B (yes, that’s a B, as in $8.8 billion worth)
  3. Kinder receives more than $400M (per year) in dividend and distribution payments from his KMI holdings

In other words, Kinder has more than a few billion reasons to defend both his stock’s crazy valuation and how he gets paid. The old-boy network of Old Wall Street and the media brotherhood are going to help him do that.

After Bear Stearns crashing … and all that we have gone through in the last 5 years as a profession, is this the best the said savants of the closed-network that was Wall St 1.0 can do?

Or, after missing epic declines in both Gold and Bonds (and after trying to freak people out at yet another higher-low for the US stock market at the August lows), is this just the end of their world as they knew it?

We don’t purport to know everything. But we do our own work and we’re looking forward to objective analysis that attempts to refute our well researched opinion. Dial into our call on Kinder Morgan at 11AM (ping sales@Hedgeye.com for access) and, instead of calling just calling us “young” (Daryl Jones and Todd Jordan are getting old!), please tell us what you think.

Our immediate-term Global Macro Risk Ranges are now:

UST 10yr Yield 2.84-3.02%

SPX 1658-1678

VIX 14.73-17.41

USD 81.22-82.68

Brent 111.91-115.19

Gold 1361-1398

Best of luck out there today,

KM

Keith R. McCullough
Chief Executive Officer

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