2 hours ago, Cincinnatus said:

Zoom is interesting. I work in IT at the mid-market to enterprise level and sell all things IT (infra, security, cloud, storage, DC) including zoom, webex, msft/cisco teams, etc. There's a lot of concern with companies using or joining a Zoom meeting. Google banned its employees from downloading or taking zoom calls, but I think this is more so because zoom chose oracle cloud over the other cloud providers (azure, gcp, aws). Covid def helped zoom propel, but I think cisco is taking this seriously and will answer. Google is also pushing pretty hard in the web conf market.

 

I can fully understand some of the security concerns with using Zoom for corporate use, especially sensitive corporate use.

 

That said, most corporate meetings are characterized more by people wanting to sneak out of them than people wanting to sneak into them.  The security flaws in Zoom that arise from prioritizing convenient access over security are not problems for everyday use, and I'm convinced they're also solvable.  Needless to say, if there are other problems under the hood, such as bad security regarding paying customers' financial information, then that thesis could blow up on me.

 

My office has begun using Microsoft Teams.  It seems to be a fairly solid, full-featured product (based on less than a month of using it at the moment, of course, so take that with a shaker of salt), but it seems primarily aimed at internal audiences.  Inviting external "guests" to a Microsoft Teams meeting has proven to be a little awkward, though I'm sure we'll work our way through it.  We haven't done much of that yet.  And, of course, for purposes of this thread, my wife owns a sizable amount of Microsoft (MSFT), too.  It hasn't gone as wild as AMZN or NFLX but it's been a very solid performer, and more importantly, it's steady, which gives me more confidence when I sometimes take a swing at something riskier.  Microsoft has very few bad years; even when the macro environment is bearish, MSFT tends to suffer less than others.

Yeah, we use Teams at my company, and it always works well. Definitely not meant for public access. 

People don't go that in depth with things when they invest. They think:

 

"Hmm, revenue is high. Buy."

 

"This product has a large user base. Buy."

 

"Demand is going to increase for this product or service. Buy."

 

"Tech. Buy."

3 hours ago, jmecklenborg said:

 

I know an old guy in Cincinnati who bought Apple stock in the 80s and...still has it.  The reason I know him is because he throws a lot of money at eccentric stuff around town like a low-wattage radio station and the Cincinnati Railroad Club.  

 

A lot of people in Cincinnati got rich when I was a kid because of P&G's stock.  Many people retired in their 50s and moved to Florida.  It caused a lot of tension because the winners weren't any wiser than the losers - to a large extent they just lucked into it.  

 

My grandmother worked as a cleaning lady at P&G from 1943 until 1949.  She didn't tell the story until after my grandfather died but she did get P&G stock but they visited a financial planner in 1955 and he advised them to sell it so they did.   

 

So in short, if they had visited a different planner or none at all they likely would have retired millionaires instead of borderline broke.  

 

 

Selling too early was definitely one of the sins of my early investing life, too.  I'm lucky to have been able to learn it in my 20s instead of my 50s.

 

However, the people in Cincinnati who got rich on P&G stock basically hit one massive home run.  That's hit and miss, and the results are as you noted.  Most retail investors are better off diversifying than trusting that they've hooked their wagon to the right ox.  That diversification can be through individual stock investing, like I do (my wife and I myself combined have around 25 individual stock positions), or much more simply through an S&P 500 index fund.  This is a contrived question since index funds didn't even exist back then, but someone who had the option to invest in low-cost, broad-market index fund in 1943 and held it until they retired probably wouldn't have been that far short of someone who got P&G stock at the time and held it until they retired.

 

1 hour ago, Cleburger said:

Apparently the Fed and Treasury Secretary think it helps.  

 

 

 

I think the real political risk is that the government will have an incentive to ensure that Wal-Mart is bailed out, if necessary, to be able to pay its debts if the government is the creditor.  That's always been the political risk with government loans.  That said, the government holds plenty of loans, many of which it's even the originator for.  It's also a guarantor of even more than that.  So this isn't exactly completely uncharted territory, despite the moral hazard.

 

 

Really all you had to do was buy the Dow 30 or tell your broker you wanted 70% in the Dow 30 and 30% in the next 470 companies.  I imagine that the brokerage would charge a fee at the end of the year to rebalance.  

 

That said, weighing $100,000 worth of stock appropriately, i.e. much more of the #1 stock as compared to the #500, was no doubt a ton of manual work back in 1950.  

Da Bears!  

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/financial-analyst-gary-shilling-says-the-stock-market-could-see-a-1930s-like-decline/ar-BB16ouXY?ocid=spartandhp

 

Quote

 

In a CNBC interview, Shilling said the stock market could plunge between 30-40% over the next year as investors realize the economic recovery from the coronavirus recession could take longer than expected.

 

"I think we've got a second leg down and that's very much reminiscent of what happened in the 1930s where people appreciate the depth of this recession and the disruption and how long it's going to take to recover," he said.

 

 

I bailed at 3,000.  It's now at 3,100.  I'll get back in around 2,800.  

 

 

 

6 minutes ago, jmecklenborg said:

Da Bears!  

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/financial-analyst-gary-shilling-says-the-stock-market-could-see-a-1930s-like-decline/ar-BB16ouXY?ocid=spartandhp

 

I bailed at 3,000.  It's now at 3,100.  I'll get back in around 2,800.  

 

 

Define "bailed."

 

I seriously hope you didn't sell all your positions in the hope of timing a downswing.

 

The market might go down 30% at some point in the next year, but it might also go up 20% ... or 30% ... or 40% before that pullback.

 

I'd consider lightening some of my positions now and moving into cash or fixed income only if I were less than 3 years from retirement.

 

June performance figures were just released on Fidelity (grey lines are my accounts, white are my wife's, last line is S&P 500 index):

 

 

It would have been very, very easy to have sold out of AMZN when it hit an all-time high around $2400 instead of continuing to hold--and it crossed $3000 today.  Could it come back to $2400?  Sure, but as I learned the hard way with TSLA, those opportunities to buy back in are easy to miss, too.

I'm still in Amazon, though not as much as I was. Kinda wished I'd held onto my larger position.

6 hours ago, Gramarye said:

The market might go down 30% at some point in the next year, but it might also go up 20% ... or 30% ... or 40% before that pullback.

 

If you're talking about boring index funds like VOO in a retirement account, which I am, you don't come out ahead if the market goes to 3500 by Labor Day and then plummets to 2500 by Thanksgiving.  You need to sell high and buy back in low at some point to get ahead.  The only difference is the meager dividend paid by most index funds. The market's push in 2019 was irrational to begin with and somehow we're hanging out at November 2019 levels right now. 

 

I still contend that the market is being thrown completely out-of-whack by a million or more Americans who were never active in the market who suddenly started throwing their cash at all sorts of random stuff.  It wasn't just the Trump check but tens of thousands in idle cash.  So the pros were sitting around making calculated decisions while the amateurs were going hog wild - and there are so many of them that they managed to push the market to completely irrational heights.  These guys have no idea what the companies are worth that they're throwing money at - and in many cases neither do the pros.  People are throwing darts in the dark. 

On 7/2/2020 at 1:59 PM, GCrites80s said:

People don't go that in depth with things when they invest. They think:

 

"Hmm, revenue is high. Buy."

 

"This product has a large user base. Buy."

 

"Demand is going to increase for this product or service. Buy."

 

"Tech. Buy."

 

10 minutes ago, jmecklenborg said:

 

I still contend that the market is being thrown completely out-of-whack by a million or more Americans who were never active in the market who suddenly started throwing their cash at all sorts of random stuff.  It wasn't just the Trump check but tens of thousands in idle cash.  So the pros were sitting around making calculated decisions while the amateurs were going hog wild - and there are so many of them that they managed to push the market to completely irrational heights.  These guys have no idea what the companies are worth that they're throwing money at - and in many cases neither do the pros.  People are throwing darts in the dark. 

 

People have no idea that increased revenue/demand has a possibility of making profitability lower. If a company is losing money on each transaction or each transaction in a particular business unit increased revenue/demand is going to decrease profit unless a company is lurking just below the tipping point of increasing profitability and the increased revenue/demand is going to push it into the profit zone. Many companies big and small deal with this all the time, including my own.

 

There was one low-margin product that we added in 2017 that turbocharged our sales on release dates but threw us into a tailspin of debt that we only recently were able to start recovering from. If we were selling 10X as much of it it would have only made things worse. If we were able to sell 100-1000X of it then it would have increased profit a decent amount, but we would still have become cash-poor for the period until it was almost all gone and unable to engage with our more-profitable lines properly. A small amount of that product still remains in our inventory nearly 3 years later and customers shrug when they see it. I needed it to all be gone in less than 8 months rather than 3 years. Losses from inventory are not treated nearly as favorably by the IRS as losses from operations -- especially payroll, which of course the IRS loves.

11 hours ago, jmecklenborg said:

You need to sell high and buy back in low at some point to get ahead.

 

This notion, as has been discussed, is nearly-entirely a myth and certainly not one that amateurs are able to pull off.  Better to just leave retirement funds in the market than to try to constantly time the market.

 

https://imgur.com/gallery/BlK4jzM

28 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

 

This notion, as has been discussed, is nearly-entirely a myth and certainly not one that amateurs are able to pull off.  Better to just leave retirement funds in the market than to try to constantly time the market.

 

https://imgur.com/gallery/BlK4jzM

 

I've seen that image strip several times before – even though I somewhat agree with the sentiment, I think the girl with "perfect timing" is a bad example. You should do what the “slow and steady” girl does - consistently invest into a retirement account with a portion of every paycheck, but you can still maintain it and move money around from risky investments to bonds, accordingly, near the highs and lows. You can ignore it and do just fine, but you can pay attention and do a bit better, and you don’t even have to hit the highs and lows perfectly to come out on top. You can be a day or even a week off.

51 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

 

This notion, as has been discussed, is nearly-entirely a myth and certainly not one that amateurs are able to pull off.  Better to just leave retirement funds in the market than to try to constantly time the market.

 

https://imgur.com/gallery/BlK4jzM

 

Except I did pull it off in my IRA back in March and again in April-May.  I'm up over $10,000 over where I would have been otherwise - I timed my 2020 IRA contribution on March 24, one day after the bottom (I hadn't put any money in yet for the year), and I sold a penny stock for 5x what I bought it for.  The situation was really easy to read back in March-April, except I'm really surprised that it jumped all the way back so quickly.  

 

My employer 401k doesn't enable this sort of behavior because you are blocked out from excessive trading for a month or more after each trade.  I believe that you can shift to one of the other 30~ options but you can't buy back in to the same fund you just sold for a few weeks.  

 

 

 

 

58 minutes ago, Ram23 said:

 

I've seen that image strip several times before – even though I somewhat agree with the sentiment, I think the girl with "perfect timing" is a bad example. You should do what the “slow and steady” girl does - consistently invest into a retirement account with a portion of every paycheck, but you can still maintain it and move money around from risky investments to bonds, accordingly, near the highs and lows. You can ignore it and do just fine, but you can pay attention and do a bit better, and you don’t even have to hit the highs and lows perfectly to come out on top. You can be a day or even a week off.

 

Day or week?

 

The 10-year S&P 500 Bond Index performance is a hair under 5.5% annualized.

 

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/fixed-income/sp-500-bond-index/#overview

 

Bond investing is not for retail investors, except perhaps retirees or those near retirement who have basically grown their nest egg to where downside protection is paramount (and even for those people, I tend to think that safer stocks--boring dividend-payers--are better than bonds).  Bond investing is for large financial institutions who have access to leverage ratios that are simply off limits to ordinary mortals (so that weaker annualized return can generate a larger return on equity).

 

Granted, we've had close to 10 years of moderate to low interest rates, so this could theoretically change in the future--but because bond sales prices are inversely related to the interest they bear, bonds that are bought today will go down in value if interest rates begin to rise again.  Bonds will have real value again if interest rates rise and then fall again; in that environment, bonds that were issued during the time when interest rates were high will sell at a premium to their face value, because debt investors will not be able to invest in new debt at strong yields.

 

I invested in a corporate bond many years ago just to see how it looked and operated on Fidelity.  I don't even remember what year it was now, or what company, for that matter.  It was nothing special and I simply held it to maturity.

 

40 minutes ago, jmecklenborg said:

 

Except I did pull it off in my IRA back in March and again in April-May.  I'm up over $10,000 over where I would have been otherwise - I timed my 2020 IRA contribution on March 24, one day after the bottom (I hadn't put any money in yet for the year), and I sold a penny stock for 5x what I bought it for.  The situation was really easy to read back in March-April, except I'm really surprised that it jumped all the way back so quickly.  

 

My employer 401k doesn't enable this sort of behavior because you are blocked out from excessive trading for a month or more after each trade.  I believe that you can shift to one of the other 30~ options but you can't buy back in to the same fund you just sold for a few weeks. 

 

Many employer 401(k) plans have a "self-directed trading" option that you need to specifically register for, that frees up all or part of your 401(k) to invest in the open market, outside the "cafeteria plan" usually provided by plan custodians as a default.  (My wife has this option; I don't, but I did at my previous employer.)

 

As for nearly perfectly timing the March 23 low, that's great--this time.  And I invested a lot of my cash cushion between March and May, too.  But positive reinforcement can be a dangerous thing.  I've had a few great calls in my life, too, some completely by accident and some where I like to think I was more deliberate.  None of it has had the kind of overall impact that simply buying for the long term and dollar-cost-averaging into high performers have had.  Some temporary surges may be responsible for the 41% and 28% YTD numbers on my longest-lasting Fidelity accounts; strong LTBH fundamentals are responsible for the 23% annualized return in this accounts for the last 5 years.

This Tesla run has to end, right?

Are they immune to the parts supply issues that every other automaker will face in the coming months? They have fewer parts than ICE cars but it only takes 1-2 missing parts to stop a line.

On 7/7/2020 at 10:41 AM, Ram23 said:

I've seen that image strip several times before – even though I somewhat agree with the sentiment, I think the girl with "perfect timing" is a bad example. You should do what the “slow and steady” girl does - consistently invest into a retirement account with a portion of every paycheck, but you can still maintain it and move money around from risky investments to bonds, accordingly, near the highs and lows. You can ignore it and do just fine, but you can pay attention and do a bit better, and you don’t even have to hit the highs and lows perfectly to come out on top. You can be a day or even a week off.

 

Yeah, that's the point of the strip.  If I were a financial advisor, I'd get the 401k and IRA set up first so you're consistently getting into pretty consistent index funds.  If you're in a position to have "extra" money you want to invest and you think you're Warren Buffett, then have it with ~5% or less of your portfolio.  Don't touch the retirement funds until ~5 years out from retirement when we'd then discuss bond allocation.

1 hour ago, GCrites80s said:

Are they immune to the parts supply issues that every other automaker will face in the coming months? They have fewer parts than ICE cars but it only takes 1-2 missing parts to stop a line.

 

Tesla is no longer being priced as an automotive stock, despite cars being their primary product (along with utility-scale backup batteries).  On a profits-per-vehicle basis, even using 5-year projections, Tesla's market cap stopped making sense at a third of its current value.  It is being priced now as a global renewable-power engineering conglomerate--value of its vehicles, auto batteries, utility batteries, technology, and ability to sell emissions credits.  Even after that, the growth assumptions of the stock at its current valuation are truly staggering.  That said, I'm still holding onto the ~38% of my position that I didn't sell, simply because whether the run is irrational or not, I don't have a good sense of when to sell.  I almost sold at $1000, and almost sold again at $1333.  I backed away both times, and at this point, I'm just along for the ride.  My cost basis is less than $80.

Tesla's market cap is now something like ~30% of the entire auto industry despite accounting for ~0.4% of sales and 0% of profits.

2 hours ago, DarkandStormy said:

This Tesla run has to end, right?

 

This tech run has to end, right? I sold off most of my Amazon, Apple and Microsoft last Thursday and was rewarded with a flat Friday. But today, I've gained $500 so far just by having a placeholder-level of ownership in each company (ie: a couple of shares of Amazon, a dozen shares of Apple, etc). I'm debating whether to buy back in.

Tech gets a boost since "people are using the internet more" even though what that means for any particular tech company varies significantly.

 

Doesn't matter, "people are using the product"

Welcome back to positive territory S&P. We missed you.

3 minutes ago, TBideon said:

Welcome back to positive territory S&P. We missed you.

 

NASDAQ > S&P

2 minutes ago, KJP said:

 

This tech run has to end, right? I sold off most of my Amazon, Apple and Microsoft last Thursday and was rewarded with a flat Friday. But today, I've gained $500 so far just by having a placeholder-level of ownership in each company (ie: a couple of shares of Amazon, a dozen shares of Apple, etc). I'm debating whether to buy back in.

 

What suggests that it has to end?  Mean-reversion is of course a powerful force, but the mean itself is also a moving target.

Leave aside TSLA, up 546% YOY.

 

Amazon is up 56% YOY.  That's significant, yes, but consider the amount of business that they've surely taken from brick and mortar stores due to the pandemic.  Consider the increased demand for cloud infrastructure (and AWS is a large, growing, and highly profitable arm of Amazon) from businesses that previously considered it an afterthought or even were simply run by old-timers determined never to learn about the "cloud" until they absolutely had to.  Amazon's price has been (still is) held back by skeptics looking at the massive capital spending and wondering if it was building too much, too quickly (look at the number of large northeast Ohio malls that have been or are being converted to Amazon distribution centers).  People are realizing now that the question isn't whether Amazon is building too much too fast, it's how quickly they can get those facilities online and stocked with inventory.

 

Microsoft is up 55% YOY.  They positioned themselves well, over many years preceding 2020, for a digital working world and they are indispensable to most modern office work, especially in the era of remote work.  It might not even be too much to say that the fact that we have Microsoft's 2020 product lineup instead of its 2010 or 2000 lineup is one major reason white collar offices are still able to function in the pandemic world.

 

Netflix is up 44% YOY.  The dominant determinants of Netflix' stock price are (1) how many subscribers they add vs. how many they lose, and (2) how much the customer base will accept in terms of price increases (which of course feeds back into #1, on the "how many they lose" side of the ledger).  The pandemic has reinforced both of those numbers.  Despite the plethora of streaming video options available in 2020, people are reluctant to cancel their Netflix subscriptions, considering the amount of time people are spending at home.  And they will even pay increased prices, as long as Netflix doesn't increase too much too fast, especially as long as they continue building up a strong stable of good, original content that they don't even need to pay license fees for.

 

Zoom is up 197%, simply because this is the year it kind of "came into its own."  Yes, it could prove to be a little bit of a bubble and a lot of future growth is already baked into the stock price at this point, but the company has a good chance of being able to grow into its expectations, because it now has the money to hire enough people to jump on the security vulnerabilities.  Of course it could botch it and not do so, but management appears to be taking its new stature seriously, at least for now.  They know they've got what may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cement themselves as a new household name in videoconferencing.  Needless to say, it's unlikely that it will be up another 197% a year from now, but it's well within the realm of possibility for it to justify the growth that it has already been given.  It has a massive customer base now that is becoming familiar with the platform, and familiarity is itself a source of brand strength; people who have learned the quirks of one brand platform are unlikely to switch to a competitor product unless that product is demonstrably superior.

 

Google is only up 35% YOY, and FB is only up 20%.  Those are good numbers by most standards, of course, but they're kind of trailing the rest of the tech rally, in part because they rely on others' marketing (ad) spending and those budgets are flexible.  But they're certainly not being zeroed out.  If ad spending had completely collapsed, The Trade Desk (TTD), which is a cloud-based platform for creating and managing digital ad campaigns, wouldn't be up 92% YOY.

 

ZScaler (ZS) is up 50% YOY and Okta (OKTA) is up 61%.  I worry sometimes about OKTA because their GAAP earnings are still negative, but the top-line growth has been very impressive and the SGA that is responsible for the earnings going negative (even though cash flow is up due to financing activities and top-line growth has been excellent) can hopefully be brought under control over time as existing customers stay (which requires less selling activity than acquiring new ones), and online security is going to be a critical part of the world going forward.

 

So on and so forth--I could go further through several other tech darlings, TWLO, AYX, etc.

 

The major attraction of tech investing is scalability.  For most tech firms (this doesn't apply to AMZN or TSLA, though), profitability increases substantially with scale because the bulk of the expenses lie on designing the product, which is then pushed out to all customers whether it's 50 or 50,000 customers.  Not that network effects don't exist in other industries, too, but tech is where they are really the center of the solar system.  And the pandemic accelerating the realm of remote work and the advent of the digital world has created the conditions for network effects to grow and put down roots more quickly.

I've drunk the cloud koolaid. AMZN and MSFT look great on the strength of their cloud services.

 

In general large companies should be better off. I moved my small cap stuff to large cap. Neither buying nor selling right now.

I wonder if Tesla fanboydom is significantly bigger overseas than it is here.  It's not hard to imagine a bunch of engineering nerds around the world plowing their surplus earnings into Tesla stock, especially since their grasp of English wouldn't be great enough to understand what an ass Musk makes of himself regularly.  

 

2 hours ago, TBideon said:

Welcome back to positive territory S&P. We missed you.

 

There is a lot of overlap in the top holdings between an S&P index like VOO and a large cap growth fund like VUG or a tech ETF like QQQ.  The top 10 of each fund is like 5 of the same companies.   

 

 

1 hour ago, Gramarye said:

 

What suggests that it has to end? 

 

 

 

Nothing lasts forever except the earth and sky. All we are is.... never mind. ? 

 

BTW, I am the one who can make it end. It never fails. I buy a stock on the rise. It stops rising. I sell a stock that's falling. It stops falling. If you wanted to know who controls the stock market...it's me.

 

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

Edited July 13, 20204 yr by KJP

15 minutes ago, KJP said:

 

Nothing lasts forever except the earth and sky. All we are is.... never mind. ? 

 

BTW, I am the one who can make it end. It never fails. I buy a stock on the rise. It stops rising. I sell a stock that's falling. It stops falling. If you wanted to know who controls the stock market...it's me.

 

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

 

Such a cynic.  Oh well, a touch of grey kinda suits you anyway.  And that was all I had to say, and it's alright.

Grateful, I am. Dead, I am not. Turns out my cynicism is warranted today. Such an amazing climb earlier. Such an amazing fall since. Tech stocks are now getting buried. I finally dumped them mid-fall rather than at the end of the fall.

23 minutes ago, KJP said:

Grateful, I am. Dead, I am not. Turns out my cynicism is warranted today. Such an amazing climb earlier. Such an amazing fall since. Tech stocks are now getting buried. I finally dumped them mid-fall rather than at the end of the fall.

I don't understand. FAANG+M is doing very well

6 minutes ago, Cavalier Attitude said:

I don't understand. FAANG+M is doing very well

 

It was doing well until midday, then it tanked. I'll buy back in soon.

21 minutes ago, Cavalier Attitude said:

I don't understand. FAANG+M is doing very well

 

Heh.  TSLA gyrates so wildly that he may be speaking in day-trader talk.  TSLA hit $1794.99 at one point today and then fell back down to $1557, after closing at $1544 yesterday.

 

That said, I generally shrug at this kind of talk and encourage others not to focus on what happens on the day or the day after they buy (or sell), unless it's a major development at the underlying company, not the bare fact of movement in the stock price.  What happens in 5 years is vastly more important than what happens in 5 minutes.

Johnny Depp loses $650 million:

https://www.the-sun.com/news/uk-news/1128782/johnny-depp-amber-heard-champagne-lost-millions/

 

I've never seen one of this guy's movies but I've always suspected that he was a total dumbass.  

1 hour ago, Gramarye said:

 

Heh.  TSLA gyrates so wildly that he may be speaking in day-trader talk.  TSLA hit $1794.99 at one point today and then fell back down to $1557, after closing at $1544 yesterday.

 

That said, I generally shrug at this kind of talk and encourage others not to focus on what happens on the day or the day after they buy (or sell), unless it's a major development at the underlying company, not the bare fact of movement in the stock price.  What happens in 5 years is vastly more important than what happens in 5 minutes.

 

If you're investing, yes.

2 hours ago, Gramarye said:

 

Heh.  TSLA gyrates so wildly that he may be speaking in day-trader talk.  TSLA hit $1794.99 at one point today and then fell back down to $1557, after closing at $1544 yesterday.

 

That said, I generally shrug at this kind of talk and encourage others not to focus on what happens on the day or the day after they buy (or sell), unless it's a major development at the underlying company, not the bare fact of movement in the stock price.  What happens in 5 years is vastly more important than what happens in 5 minutes.

TSLA is the sexy stock and the name brand product. However, what is going on with TSLA is more of an industry phenomenon and it seems as if the Electric car companies are getting traction and credibility now as much more viable. Tesla is in the best shape and is obviously best capitalized, which is why the stock is what it is. Instead of buying TSLA at a premium, why not look into WOrkhorse. It is much more affordable and poised to ride on TSLA's coattails. It also has some key government contracts and the UPS electric fleet contract too. 

 

Similar to cryptos from a couple years back. Bitcoin may have been the name brand, but some of the smaller lesser known ones presented great value plays in the short term.

6 hours ago, Brutus_buckeye said:

TSLA is the sexy stock and the name brand product. However, what is going on with TSLA is more of an industry phenomenon and it seems as if the Electric car companies are getting traction and credibility now as much more viable. Tesla is in the best shape and is obviously best capitalized, which is why the stock is what it is. Instead of buying TSLA at a premium, why not look into WOrkhorse. It is much more affordable and poised to ride on TSLA's coattails. It also has some key government contracts and the UPS electric fleet contract too. 

 

Similar to cryptos from a couple years back. Bitcoin may have been the name brand, but some of the smaller lesser known ones presented great value plays in the short term.

 

LOL See my post from 2 weeks ago, on the last page?

 

On 7/1/2020 at 4:45 PM, Gramarye said:

I did actually establish a trial position in WKHS today.  I definitely worry it's a bubble (looks like some high-frequency or high-volume guys noticed the company around 6/18), but it looks like it has at least some decent prospects and I thought it was worth taking a flyer on.  Just enough to keep me interested and make me follow the company.

 

Of course that little trial position is less than 1/20th of my TSLA stake, but my TSLA stake didn't start out anywhere close to its current size, either.

 

I'm a little leery of the fact that part of the investing thesis for Workhorse appears to be their stake in Lordstown Motors (https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/07/13/why-workhorse-group-stock-is-higher-today.aspx).  While Lordstown Motors might prove to be a great investment, it's a black box as far as the financial statements of Workhorse are concerned.  Maybe I'll be able to find something about Lordstown Motors in the Workhorse SEC statements, but the information I'd actually want is probably confidential to Lordstown and therefore Workhorse isn't going to be revealing it in public filings even if they know it.  I'm not generally a fan of investing in a public company as an indirect way of investing in a private company.

3 minutes ago, Gramarye said:

 

LOL See my post from 2 weeks ago, on the last page?

 

 

Of course that little trial position is less than 1/20th of my TSLA stake, but my TSLA stake didn't start out anywhere close to its current size, either.

 

I'm a little leery of the fact that part of the investing thesis for Workhorse appears to be their stake in Lordstown Motors (https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/07/13/why-workhorse-group-stock-is-higher-today.aspx).  While Lordstown Motors might prove to be a great investment, it's a black box as far as the financial statements of Workhorse are concerned.  Maybe I'll be able to find something about Lordstown Motors in the Workhorse SEC statements, but the information I'd actually want is probably confidential to Lordstown and therefore Workhorse isn't going to be revealing it in public filings even if they know it.  I'm not generally a fan of investing in a public company as an indirect way of investing in a private company.

Ha, I did not see that from last week. Sorry to steal your thought ? . I would not invest my 401k money in WOrkhorse but a little play money could be interesting. 

Edited July 14, 20204 yr by Brutus_buckeye

On 6/12/2020 at 11:47 AM, Cincinnatus said:

Workhorse Group WKHS is up huge for me. Was around .50 a share a little over a year ago, hovering around $3.60 now.

 

You guys missed the WKHS bandwagon by about a month.

I'm confused. I thought KJP was saying the tech sector had been doing poorly since the fall. I went back and looked at those 6 tech stocks, FAANG and Microsoft, and they are all up since then.

6 hours ago, Cavalier Attitude said:

I'm confused. I thought KJP was saying the tech sector had been doing poorly since the fall. I went back and looked at those 6 tech stocks, FAANG and Microsoft, and they are all up since then.

 

No, I was saying that the tech sector was doing poorly since Friday and I've been trading in and out of stocks since then.

Oh, okay. I don't day trade. Buy and hold.

On 7/14/2020 at 9:23 AM, DarkandStormy said:

 

You guys missed the WKHS bandwagon by about a month.

They just got CA clearance. Mark my word ... I bet this hits ~$60/share.

 

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/workhorse-c-series-all-electric-delivery-trucks-awarded-executive-order-from-the-california-air-resources-board-301091956.html

Buy and hold, if that's your thing

Tesla posted a profit for the 4th consecutive quarter and is now eligible for the S&P 500.

It's from selling emissions credits to the Big 3 so that they don't have to build normal cars and instead can be niche manufacturers that only sell bigass trucks, SUVs and muscle cars in only one country. Without selling the emissions credits they would have lost $300 million in Q2. So the success of Tesla is dependent on Buzz the Overpaid Boomer buying Rams and F-150s that have a real-world 15MPG with no consequences.

 

This is helping the environment enormously

3 minutes ago, GCrites80s said:

Without selling the emissions credits they would have lost $300 million in Q2.

 

This is why they have no business being included in the S&P 500.  Plus their side businesses are doing basically nothing. 

 

The advantage the ridiculous stock price gives them is that it gives them a) a ton of free publicity and b) they can sell more stock without significantly diluting its value as opposed to selling more junk bonds. 

Here's a fun one.  I sold more than half of my position in this years ago because it had actually been flat or declining at the time.  Not quite as big a facepalm-worthy moment for me as selling 2/3 of my TSLA position, but still should have definitely held on:

 

This is Boston Beer Company (SAM), makers of Sam Adams and owners of Angry Orchard and a few other brands, for the last year.  Look at the change after March:

 

 

We now know what a great many Americans did with their stimulus checks.

^Alcohol an industry that seemed like it was able to ramp up supply with almost nothing in the way of production issues. I wonder if the capacity they use for things like holidays and special events like the Super Bowl was able to be utilized.

Why would somebody hold a stock like that long-term that doesn't pay even a paltry dividend?