"It's days like these that keep me on my winning streak." - Butch Walker and the Let's Go Out Tonights

Let's rock:

1) Traders Short Junk-Bond ETFs as Gains Top 100% (Bloomberg) - Apparently there's a little too much froth on the junk bond latté, because credit traders are hedging with ETFs in droves. Is there something to this, or are these guys just trying to be the next Michael Burry?

2) $614M SAC Capital Settlement a Sign of Wall Street’s Cynical Calculus (Daily Beast) - Now that it's official that there will be no criminal prosecutions for Wall Street skulduggery (see #4), banks and hedge funds can just work the cost of fines into their overhead calculations. He who pays and runs away lives to steal another day.

3) F*ckin’ Europe. Again. (The Reformed Broker) - Josh Brown routinely cracks me up, but he really had me rolling with this one.

You guys know I keep pretty close tabs on the start-up scene around the US. What you might not know is how much I hate shopping in general, but shopping for clothes in particular. So when I first read about Bombfell I thought it was a cool idea, but they were just in the accelerator phase with 500 Startups so I didn't give it much thought. Then I read about them again last month when they raised a $730,000 seed round, and that's when the idea really clicked for me. Not only is it a unique business model, but it sounded like a great service. So I signed up.

Here's how it works: each month Bombfell sends you an article or articles of clothing (depending upon your budget) selected for you by a professional stylist based on your individual measurements and preferences. How individual? Sign up with your Facebook account and the stylist will actually cruise your photos to get a feel for your personal style. If you like what they send you, you keep it. If you don't, you send it back and they pay the shipping both ways. You can't lose.

If you haven't read The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane then it goes without saying that you're failing at life. But when I interviewed Randall Lane about the book in February 2011, he never mentioned to me that they were making it into a YouTube miniseries detailing the craziness that was Trader Monthly. You can imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon it recently, and I thought you guys would get a kick out of it too. Here's the trailer, and all five episodes are posted after the jump. Enjoy:

The prevailing wisdom over the past decade was that if you wanted to throw your hat into the tech startup ring there was only one place to do it - Silicon Valley. By and large this was true. Over the years however, a number of other cities have taken aim at the tech crown, and now people are starting to speculate that New York is the place to be - not Palo Alto.

I only bring this up for one reason. I had a meeting last week with the CEO of Dashlane and the CTO and co-founder of Eventbrite (which handles the ticketing for the WSO Conference). Both companies are headquartered in the US but run all of their tech development out of France (for reasons I'll get to in a minute). Eventbrite is a Silicon Valley company, and Dashlane is a Silicon Alley company.

Eventbrite started in 2006 when Silicon Valley still very much had the upper hand. But they were a company that could have gone either way, because they bootstrapped on founder money until 2008 when they raised $1.5 million in Series A funding. By the time they did the raise, the business model was proven - so they could've gotten funded anywhere. In 2010 they raised another $10 million and are looking at doing $1 billion in ticket sales this year.

The Euro is hitting three-month lows today, and for good reason. For those of you who may not have been paying attention this weekend, banks in Cyrus were near default and a bailout plan was agreed to on Saturday. As bailouts go, this one is historic - and not in a good way.

For the first time in nearly a century, individual depositors are going to take a haircut on their deposits under €100,000 - despite having FDIC-like depositors insurance. Depositors with less than €100,000 on deposit will forfeit 6.75% of their balance, and those with more than €100,000 on deposit will forfeit 9%. The haircut is being billed as a tax or a levy, but the net result is that it completely undermines all trust in depositors insurance and, by extension, the entire global banking system.

This is a line that should have never been crossed. The rumor of it led to widespread bank runs on Friday, and now that it's reality, the banks aren't even open in Cyprus.

Hardly a day goes by here in France anymore without some mention in the press about all the tax exiles fleeing to Belgium. Actor Gerard Depardieu and LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault are just two of the famous high-earners to turn their back on France in the wake of Hollande's tax increases on the wealthy. But it might surprise you to learn that it's been quietly happening in America, too.

The latest big hitter said to be mulling a run for the border is none other than hedge fund titan John Paulson. He's reportedly looking into moving to Puerto Rico where there is no local or federal taxes on capital gains for new residents. It would certainly be a surprising move by the lifelong New Yorker and major cheerleader for the Big Apple. If he does make the move though, it won't be hard for him to put together a poker game down island.

Boy, have I got a story for you guys next week. Here we go:

1) Short-Seller Sues Icahn, Banks For Aiding Herbalife 'Fraud' (FIN Alternatives) - Look up "Wishful Thinking" in the dictionary and you're gonna see a picture of this guy's face. I'm all for what he's doing, but he's got about a snowball's chance in hell of it working out.

2) Fugitive Fund Manager Stuffed Underwear With Cash, Fled (Bloomberg) - How do you stuff $500,000 in your underwear? Remember my old post about crossing stocks? That's what this jerkoff was doing when he went on the lam. Now he's facing 75 years. Totally worth it. NOT.

3) It’s so unfair, say 'under-paid’ bankers (The Telegraph) - Cue the violins. London bankers are bitching to high heaven that they're overworked and underpaid. So that's new.

This might not be big news for some (most) of you, but for those of you who use Google Reader to keep up with the goings on of the market and various blogs, this might have a big impact on you. Google announced today that it's groundbreaking RSS aggregator will be no more as of July 1.

Predictably, the news was met with plenty of teeth gnashing and rending of garments among the Internet cool kids, and petitions have already sprung up begging Google for a reprieve. Some of the reactions so far have been hilarious.

I'm kinda sorry to see it go. Google Reader was a huge part of my daily ritual in the early days of WSO. I'll admit I haven't logged into it in a long while though, and when I did a couple weeks ago I had thousands of unread articles. I basically use Twitter and Zite instead of Reader these days, and apparently so do a lot of other people because that's the reason that's being thrown around for the retirement of Reader.

I am crushing so hard on Liz Warren right now. She knows there won't be any justice in the HSBC case, so now she's taken to just publicly humiliating bank regulators on the national stage. In this latest installment, she wonders aloud what it takes to even hold a hearing to shut down a bank if the concerted, repeated, unapologetic laundering of $881 million for drug cartels and terrorists isn't enough. The regulator's stammering is hilarious and, even though Warren accomplishes nothing, this is just great TV. Enjoy:

A big hat tip to The Reformed Broker for finding this gem.

Imagine becoming a hedge fund manager with no formal training whatsoever. It's the dream of every early finance major at some point. Skip all this BS school and the debt that goes along with it, just publish my own research on Seeking Alpha, and let the money come rolling in, right? Well that's exactly what Andy Zaky did - and it cost his investors every penny they sent him.

To be fair, Zaky first established himself as a sort of AAPL wunderkind. Though he had no formal training in financial management or analysis, he did graduate from UCLA and UCLA Law School. He took to writing about Apple on Seeking Alpha and developed a healthy following because of the accuracy of his predictions. He claimed to have learned all he knows about stocks and finance from the Internet.

Then he started a subscription newsletter which was all AAPL, all the time. At first he charged $49 a month, but when the newsletter grew even more popular he raised the price to $200 a month - and still signed up 700 subscribers. I'll give you a minute to do the math on that.