After 35 years of stockbroking for some of the biggest houses and investors in Australia and the UK, the Secret Broker is regaling Stockhead readers with his colourful war stories — from the trading floor to the dealer’s desk.

America has been going off the scales over the last 10 days and it feels like watching a real-life soap opera, streaming live.

We have them recording a record amount of COVID cases, Elon pulling the levers to an Astronaut splash down (45 years after the last one), Apple becoming close to being the first ever $2 trillion company and a six-hour live streamed TV spectacle, which featured two of the world’s richest and most powerful men wearing collar’s and ties while receiving the ‘Hot Seat’ treatment.

Gripping stuff.

The reason why these uber wealthy and powerful men were wearing ties and become cast as the main characters in a six-hour live video stream is because they are trying to climb out of a seal breaking pressure cooker situation building up, on the monopolies and power they control.

And she’s about to blow.

As Kerry Packer once said, “Monopolies should be banned, unless of course I happen to own it, in which case, I have no objections”, and America is looking at taking the same action with these boys as they did with Microsoft in the late 90s over their ruthless crushing of competition.

Now, I don’t expect you to sit through the whole six hours so I have highlighted the best bits and put in a link to their timing.

Firstly, Mark Zuckerberg suggests that an email about using 5 per cent to 10 per cent of their cashflow to buy up rivals was a joke. Being that wealthy and still getting a pudding bowl haircut, is the real joke for me.

Starts at 3.29.00 (to 3.32.06)

Then we have Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, stalling over answers that they blatantly copy others’ extremely popular software programs and simply create their own versions, thus crushing the originators advantage.

The only thing missing in Jeff’s performance is the white cat being stroked on his lap, Blofeld style.

Starts at 5.14.01.

Then finally we have Tim Cook (or Tim Apple, as Trump calls him), who looks like an accountant who has swapped his tank top for a jacket and tie.

His handling of how Apple take down rival Apps is a classic. He’s not as wealthy as the other two, though I did work out that what he earns in a fortnight, would cover 9,575 Australian Jobseekers fortnightly payments, thus making one tank top Tim = 9,575 Australians.

Starts at 5.17.57.

If you are in self isolation and need to kill off six hours of time, then the whole show is here:

Power and greed can bring many enemies and that is why the boys were trying to spin a different view with their ‘who us? Never’ replies, though if you want to see this power in play, then you only need to look at the play Google just made.

They just bought 6.6 per cent of a ADT Inc and then announced a $US450m ($625m) JV, which caused a stampede of buying by 45,000 Robinhood traders who pushed the share price up by 76 per cent.

ADT Inc Share Price

Meanwhile, investors were watching their rival in the exact same sector, Alarm.com, get marked down by 25 per cent, as Google controls a rival product (Google Nest) and now Alarm.com shareholders really are alarmed.

 

Alarm.com Holdings Share Price

The last time I can recall a week with this much American entertainment, was in 1980, when I, together with 350 million other people around the world tuned in to watch the ‘Who shot J.R?’ episode from the TV show ‘Dallas’.

The Turkish government even had a recess in Parliament, so all the MP’s could rush home to watch it as it became at the time, the most watched TV episode ever.

 

J.R. Ewing in the same boat as Donald Trump

At the time, J.R. Ewing, was the most hated man in soap TV history and Trump reminds me of him.

Ahead of the show, the bookies had J.R.’s ex-wife as the 6-4 favourite, his ex-mistress (who was also his ex-sister in law) was at 4-1, a banker he swindled was also 4-1 and as an outsider, Thomas the Tank engine came in at 25-1.

I was thinking that, if someone did actually shoot Donald Trump, after his last TV interview, then the line-up of suspects would go all the way from the White House and down the road for about 5 miles with his current and ex-wives commanding the same 4-1 odds.

Though looking at the nature of these Robinhood traders I could see them also chasing Thomas the Tank Engine down to 4-1.

These Robinhood traders are a force to watch and follow, as 668,000 hold Apple stock, 638,000 own Amazon and only 244,000 own Facebook, so you can see who they think will be hurt the most when the Monopoly board gets flipped over.

Let’s see who is holding the ‘Go directly to Jail’ card and who is holding the ‘Advance to GO and collect $200’ card and who’s rolling with the dice.

Game on!

PS. The reference of Thomas The Tank engine came from Wikipedia and even though I suspect it is fake news from a joking hacker, I left it in as a homage to Donald Trump and his interpretation of the news.

The Secret Broker can be found on Twitter here @SecretBrokerAU or on email at [email protected].

Feel free to contact him with your best stock tips and ideas.