Wed Sept 23 2020
check out this link for the Socionomics Institute study of all Presidential Elections in the US
If the market keeps repeating this past Monday and today Wednesday, Trump maybe in trouble.
Professor Elam
Accounting & Investing Info for San Antonio A & M
about
-
Professor Elam
-
Professor Elam
Wed Sept 23 2020
San Antonio Chapter
This evening at 5:45, Lawrence Coffee and I will join two other speakers for a quick discussion of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence as part of Lawrence's San Antonio Datanuts group.The free web meeting will qualify for 1 hour of CPE and has no pre-requisites.
The link is below.
https://www.meetup.com/bianalytics/events/272555955/
Would love to have you join us!
– Mike Lovelace, CMA
VP Engagement, San Antonio ChapterUpdate your email preferences to choose the types of email you receive
-
Professor Elam
Wed Sept 23 2020
Please send this flyer to all college of Business faculty so that they can send it to their students. The link for the panel is HTTP://BIT.LY/LATINXPANEL (The LATINXPANEL part is case sensitive!). This panel is part of TAMUSA’s Hispanic Heritage Month. It will be held Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm. Our very own Business faculty will be presenting this Latinx Business Professors Discussion: My Professional Identity. The panelists are Dr. Josie Sosa-Fey, Dr. Pablo Calafiore, and Dr. Jesus Jimenez Andrade.
Dan
Daniel A. Glaser-Segura, Ph.D.
Professor of Management
Fulbright Professor to Romania
Texas A&M University-San Antonio
One University Way, San Antonio, TX 78224
Central Academic Building 418 E
Tel: 210-784-2324
E-mail: dglaser@tamusa.edu
-
Professor Elam
Tuesday Sept 22 2020
Nikola electric truck maker CEO resigns amid charges of misrrepresentation.
https://www.aol.com/nikola-stock-collapses-ceo-trevor-083631613.html
The stock, traded on the Nasdaq, tumbled by over 30% at Wall Street’s opening bell on Monday, but clawed back some of those losses in midday trading. Nikola is a competitor of industry leader Tesla (TSLA), which itself has been in the crosshairs of short-seller campaigns accusing CEO Elon Musk of mismanagement and impropriety.
Nikola has been under pressure for more than a week, after activist short-seller Hindenburg Research issued an extensive report on Sept. 10 claiming Nikola “is an intricate fraud built on dozens of lies” over the course of Milton’s career.
Recall that GM's Mary Barra has inked a deal to construct the trucks Nikola designs. If this is true, it will not speak well for her due diligence or that of GM.
As I say I never run out of new material in accounting ethics.
-
Professor Elam
Tuesday Sept 22 2020
One of my 12 steps in Conquer Accounting is to adopt a pattern of reading investment websites as well as the WSJ every day.
Today's Tuesday issue is a great example. Let's get started
On the back page fellow socionomist Peter Atwater is quoted commenting on the GM Nikola deal
at extremes in sentiment even th4 adults in the room capitulate and want to join the kids. Nikola was recently valued at more than Ford. As Peter notes this is typical top of the market behavior. The article cites Enron, Worldcom, Madoff and the disastrous Time AOL deal, later the largest write off in history to that time.
A front page article has short seller Hindenburg accusing Nikola of making exaggerated claims about its technology. The CEO has resigned. Nikola has lost a third of its value since the report came out and dropped 19% Monday
Even Jeff Katzenberg is having trouble signing clients for Quibi, yet another streaming service in a crowded field.
My investment weblog https://professorelam.typepad.com/markets/
spent the summer warning of decreasing breadth in the stock markets Today is the autumn equinox, often a time of shift in markets.
The DJIA was down over 900 points intra day Monday. Gold dropped $51 by day end. Silver dropped 10% on the day. Crude oil dropped 4.3%. Energy and Energy Service shares were hammered.
A judge in Michigan rules that ballots postmarked Nov 2 can be counted up to 14 days later. So expect Michigan to not report election night. See the mess coming with mail in ballots?
Daniel Planko claims the free market can deliver free college. He compares Higher Ed to the brokerage business in 1999 when a trade cost $200. .Today trades are near free. Brokerages found other ways to make money. But it is hard to see how the existing college system can do that, certainly not with the high fixed cost it carries today. I have warned Higher Ed could go the way of the whaling industry from 1848-1858.
Another article w Your Company Health Plan Isn't Safe in a Biden Presidency, Kamala wants 100% govt take over, yikes.
Cruise Lines want to sail again but the CDC says the crowded conditions are a hotbed for transmission. Carnival wants to sell 18 ships, to who I wonder?
An interview with hoteliers in the SA paper Sunday suggests to me we are not grasping all the economic effects of this pandemic. Hotel occupancy is about 30%, 60% is break even. Property taxes are still at 100%, no discount for low occupancy. And airlines, hotels and restaurants are all linked. Throw in cruise lines and those are whole industries on the verge of BK.
Harley Davidson gets a new female CEO from the Food Industry. She will have a steep learning curve to the powersports industry. I would guess HD has topped out in terms of market share.
check out Deflation.com.
\
-
Professor Elam
Tuesday Sept 22, 2020
An all female race team will compete at the famed German raceway this weekend.
They are entering a VW GTI.
We sponsored the first TAMUSA Entrepreneurial Spirit conference on South Texas women in business this past fall. Looks like
we had the expansionary mood of women correct!
-
Professor Elam
Friday Sept 18 2020
hEY Chairmahn Carmine Di Sibio apologies.
EY was late in detecting, at least now they claim they found the fraud, $2 billion in assets ont actually on teh books of Wirecard.
Wirecard filed for bankruptcy in June, three days after acknowledging that $2 billion in assets listed on its balance sheet likely did not exist. In the scandal’s aftermath, Wirecard investors are suing EY, while Germany’s financial regulator, BaFin, is investigating how Wirecard perpetuated the fraud for so long.
EY, which audited Wirecard for a decade, found the $2 billion discrepancy and refused to sign off on Wirecard’s 2019 financial report. The discovery, however, came after numerous media and investor reports about potential discrepancies at Wirecard, as well as issues raised by another firm, KPMG, during an audit conducted at Wirecard’s request.
EY has a lot of explaining to do.
NMC Health, UAE’s largest private healthcare provider; Luckin, China’s largest coffee chain; and German payments company Wirecard are each mired in stunning financial scandals.
One factor they have in common: EY, through its affiliates in various countries, has been the auditor for all three companies.
A British high court also threw dirt on EY’s sullied reputation in April when it ordered EY to pay $11 million to a former partner in Dubai who blew the whistle on an alleged money-laundering scheme by a client and sued for damages and expenses for the retaliation he suffered.
These cases have dealt a series of heavy blows to EY’s credibility and integrity, even though EY has said it was unaware of longtime financial shenanigans by its clients and was duped along with everyone else.
Justice Tim Kerr said in his April 17 ruling that EY officials offered to write the compliance report for Kaloti in a manner that obscured the findings of violations by describing them as “documentary irregularities.”
Bottom Line for ACCT 4311 and 5308 students.
If a local or regional firm made errors of this magnitude, I doubt the firm wold continue to exist. But EY is TBTF Too Big to Fail and continues in business. How could EY miss $314 M in fake sales at Luckin?
Please read both linked articles. Now ask yourself, if the AICPA has a Code of Conduct, well which survives, the Code or EY? These articles do not indicate if anyone lost their job at EY. I doubt they did. If so what is the penalyy for malfeasance?
The reality is that events at EY do not square with all the claims of due professional care and skepticism in the textbook.
-
Professor Elam
Friday Sept 18 2020
Fooled by Randomness
Nassim Nicholas Taleb advocates a ‘black swan robust society’. This means a society that can withstand difficult to predict events. His metaphor of a Black Swan is an unexpected or difficult to imagine event. For centuries it was believed all swans were white, until a black swan was discovered in Australia.
The Covid Pandemic has been a Black Swan Event. Yet in retrospect, perhaps society was clinging to rear view mirror ideas of how to get things done. Did we really need airplanes crammed with passengers leaving major airports every ninety seconds? Apparently we did not.
Entire industries are facing a top to bottom re-make or possibly the oss of large segments.
Exxon and Chevron are partnering with the Rocky Mountain Institute to track methane emissions in the Permian Basin. The industry has come under criticism for flaring excess natural gas. Most major international energy firms like BP are already looking away from carbon fuels to wind and solar. In ten years Exxon has gone from the most valuable company on earth to being ejected from the Dow Industrials. Hello Black Swan. Event.
Natural gas inventories swelled to 3.6 trillion cubic feet last week above analyst expectations (another unexpected event). As a result natural gas futures collapsed 9.9 percent in one day to $2.042.
Emerging markets have been the source of carbon fuel demand. But last quarter India’s GDP dropped 39 from a year earlier. No wonder demand is faltering.
Energy service continues to contract losing over 100,000 jobs. Only 326% of S & P energy firms are now in bullish posture.
The FED has spent billions buying bonds to shore up the stock market. That money has found its way into tech and pharmaceutical shares. The NASD registered a new high. But the percent of NASD stocks in bullish position is only 55%, and falling Again this speaks to narrowing breadth of leadership with IPOs like Snowflake skewing the results.
The fate of entire industries remains unknown. Six months into the pandemic, America’s offices sit half empty. Airline traffic is only 30% of what it was a year ago. Airline execs were in Washington this week asking for $25 billion to keep workers employed. As noted that is a small numer compared to a $1.5 Trillion rescue. But with Zoom and Webex dominating the new conversation, airlines look a lot like the horse and buggy industry circa 1905.
Hotels are doing no better with airline travel reduced. Governor Abbott is allowing more restaurants and bars to have larger patronage. But expectations are still that many such firms will not survive.
The big winner is Amazon now planning hundreds of new distribution centers. Brick and mortar retail continues to shrink.
-
Professor Elam
Wed Sept 16 2020
A Virginia based software engineering firmpleaded guilty to millions of bribes.
A Virginia-based software engineering firm has pleaded guilty to federal charges in a long-running bribery and fraud scheme at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph that involved hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts.
William Dunn, the majority owner and president of QuantaDyn Corporation, entered the guilty plea on behalf of his company to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
A criminal trial for three others involved is set here early next year. They were indicted in January and face conspiracy and fraud charges in a contract scheme that allegedly ran from 2006 to 2018.
Where were the internal auditors?
-
Professor Elam
Wed Sept 16 2020
Who will win the 2020 presidential election?
Many pundits talk about the economy as the deciding factor.
But did you know that the stock market is a more powerful presidential re-election indicator than GDP, inflation and the unemployment rate combined?
It's true. That was one key finding of a 2012 paper by our team at the Socionomics Institute.
Read the Institute's groundbreaking elections paper for yourself now, free.
You'll learn what history suggests about the odds in the 2020 race for the White House.
You'll also see why it's the most-downloaded research paper on presidential elections in the history of the Social Science Research Network.
Download your FREE copy from SSRN.com
(Look for the download button at the top of the page.)
Professor Elam 