Can I get some advice please.
Yes. This is... psychological advice, not investment advice.
I don't know what happened to my nerve, but I've been frozen in paralysis for the last month or so. I don't exactly make a lot of money at my job, but I do make a decent amount more than my expenses every month. In the last 1.5 years, I've saved up a good deal of money by living pretty modestly. That's why, when I wake up in the morning and see that I've lost over a month's worth of pay before I open my eyes, it's pretty horrifying. After a couple of those episodes, I got rid of my shares and quickly went crying under my blanket.
You can't stomach the stock market fluctuations. They upset you. This is why most people are told to stay out of the individual stock market.
My family has a *very very strong tolerance* for market fluctuations. I once bought a position (about 1/5 of my total assets) which dropped by 50% and sat there for a year, before rising back up and tripling my original investment two years later. I wasn't bothered at all. This is why I can do long-term investment in individual stocks.
I'm primarily living off my investments. And none of them pay dividends! So my livelihood is actually dependent on the ability to sell the stock at appreciated prices. But the daily fluctuations do not bother me. I keep enough cash for a year, and make sure each year that I liquidate enough for the next year.
As a long termer you MUST have a time horizon. When you buy a stock for the long haul, you have to be ready to completely ignore the stock price until your time period has come up; to shrug it off. You only look at the price when your time horizon is up, or when there is actually news (you know, like "Musk has been killed by a meteorite!")
This happens to be around the time TSLA started taking off. I've been wanting to get back in every day, but it's already gone up so much, so quickly that I can't kick the feeling that a huge crash/correction is coming just around the corner, and if I buy in now, it'll probably drop 10 points come next week or something stupid.
It probably will. I'm not usually good at short-term timing. I tend to buy at local highs. If you buy in now, expect it to drop by 20% next week. If you think it'll be worth $1000/share in 2019, *you don't care*.
What would you guys do if you were in my shoes?
Well, the thing is, I'm not in your psychological shoes. I'm going to give you my generic speech which I give to every newbie interested in investing.
(1) The most important thing is to be able to sleep at night. Don't invest in anything which keeps you awake at night. The money isn't worth the stress-related illnesses.
(2) You want an emergency fund, in an FDIC-insured bank account, sufficient to deal with any likely emergency. So that you never have to sell an investment on a day when you don't want to.
For me, market fluctuations don't bother me *at all*.
But anything involving being in debt keeps me awake at night -- so I don't use leveraged strategies.
And anything involving the whiff of criminality by the execs bothers me a great deal and leaves me wondering "if they'll cheat their customers, will they cheat their stockholders?" So I've stayed out of some bank stocks which could have been very profitable, because they would have kept me awake at night.
And it turns out (I experimented once) that I hate being on the wrong side of time decay. It makes me nervous and I stop thinking clearly. So I don't like being long on options, so I don't buy options. (I do sell options.)
Risk tolerance isn't a single thing. You have to take the risks which YOU personally can tolerate. I'm unusual. I know people who are fine with very heavy debt and time decay but still bothered by the fluctuations.
If you still really want to get into TSLA stock despite the fact that the market fluctuations have been keeping you awake at night, these are my tips for changing your psychology:
-- NEVER look up the stock price online. Just don't.
-- Buy the stock and *forget about it* for at least a year.
-- Don't hang out on this forum!
-- Remember that you haven't lost money until you sell the stock. (This is the IRS opinion!)
If you don't have enough discipline to "buy and forget", the stock is probably going to keep upsetting you. You have to decide whether the amount of money you could make is worth developing nasty stress-related illnesses. I'd probably say no, myself, but then I already have stress-related illnesses.
