Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[adiggs]

How does it do that? This really is a math game. My wife has her doctorate in stochastics. Her opinion is that she can't develop an algorithm to predict the stock market unless she can pick and chose assumptions.
But what I can't get out of her is how does a stock performance change from one day to the next without any known position or event that would cause change to be known...
What I am saying is, Who is making all the decisions to make TSLA do what they want? It sure as hell ain't any of the people that love or hate TSLA.

There is apparently a fair bit of research that indicates that daily movements in the stock market and individual stocks are a random walk. If you drop those daily changes into a distribution, it's amazingly normal, with a very small # of outliers on the high side (stock going up) or to the downside (stock going down).

I believe that short term traders (and especially day traders) use this relationship to place a high number of small trades anytime there's a move one way or the other (as the short term normal distribution indicates it'll be coming back). If you can be consistently right 60% of the time over a high volume of equal sized trades, then you've pretty much got this casino dialed and you can retire.

 

[adiggs]

Steve Jobs is Dead & APPL is still minting monies

Yes they are (OMG are they ever). I'm not seeing the big headline grabbing innovations any longer though. I don't follow Apple closely enough to know if there is still a high rate of innovation in the detailed stuff though.

 

[Krugerrand]

Elon definitely planned to be out of Tesla by now, focused entirely on SpaceX. For now I think he'll just shift more of his time to non-Tesla endeavors.

Once Y is ramped on 3 continents, truck and semi are out......what's left?

View attachment 549686

He changed his mind years ago about that. He’s in it to win it all now.

 

[Krugerrand]

So the rumours are true: batteries not included!

Nor the software, apparently.

 

[adiggs]

He changed his mind years ago about that. He’s in it to win it all now.

If the rest of the auto industry wasn't afraid before, they should really be afraid now. Elon deciding to win rather than show the way = scary Elon (for the other industry participants).

 

[jerry33]

How does it do that? This really is a math game. My wife has her doctorate in stochastics. Her opinion is that she can't develop an algorithm to predict the stock market unless she can pick and chose assumptions.
But what I can't get out of her is how does a stock performance change from one day to the next without any known position or event that would cause change to be known...
What I am saying is, Who is making all the decisions to make TSLA do what they want? It sure as hell ain't any of the people that love or hate TSLA.

My understanding is that on low volume days, it's the Market Makers and hedge funds that set the prices. They may be lower or higher depending upon what makes them more money. On high volume days whales, investment funds, and retail investors set the tone--which is almost always higher. Normally it's not possible to know in advance which days are going to be high volume (though Monday seems to be common--except when it isn't). So the only real way to profit is to pick a price you are comfortable buying at and buy and hold (if you have a decent sum to invest, you can spread the buying over time--but not too long a time). Otherwise it's just luck. Similar to Vegas, you bet small or large amounts depending upon whether you are having a lucky run or not. You come out ahead if your larger bets pay off, but play long enough and the house always wins.

 

[LN1_Casey]

Wow, my baby sell order was literally .11 off the high today. Talk about perfect placement for something. Though the SP has been sticking fairly well to 950, even despite Ron Baron's morning discussion and pretty key points about it improving over the next few years.

 

[woodisgood]

Wow, my baby sell order was literally .11 off the high today. Talk about perfect placement for something. Though the SP has been sticking fairly well to 950, even despite Ron Baron's morning discussion and pretty key points about it improving over the next few years.

Getting your S yet?

 

[Cherry Wine]

Dipped my toe in the water with some LEAPs today with money harvested from covered calls. Let the tanking commence.

 

[Tslynk67]

Having only an amateur acquaintance with nature, no. The boring company has no worm hole button, so far.

Surely with enough entangled protons to hand it's actually feasible?

 

[LN1_Casey]

Getting your S yet?

Yup, yup. Super excited to place my order soon. Just missed the FUSC, but the $5k reduction is quite nice--helps offset the taxes I'll have to pay in Hawaii.

 

[lafrisbee]

Investors show up to invest like soldiers in their own war, each fighting their own battle and defining their own victories and losses. Rational behavior is contextual and everyone has their own context to view the world. Your wife would probably like Burton Malkiel's classic investment book "A Random Walk Down Wall Street". I'm not sure if he intended to imply, but my takeaway was the Wall St acts according to Quantum mechanics.

I'll tell her. She is naive (as I am about wall street). But armies of individuals would slowly shift from buy to sell to hold to...The movements of TSLA are so sudden and often without any stimulation, and they stop just as oddly. It isn't done for fun. There is money and lives at stake...and yet the flow follows?

 

[Tslynk67]

Yes they are (OMG are they ever). I'm not seeing the big headline grabbing innovations any longer though. I don't follow Apple closely enough to know if there is still a high rate of innovation in the detailed stuff though.

They got pretty good with emojis

 

[lafrisbee]

A contributor that used to post here passionately posited that day-to-day stock gyrations are impossible to predict because so many participants have their own reasons for doing what they do at any given time.

I tend to agree with the view.

I would like to believe that innocent perspective. if it were so then how to explain the sudden overnight stop of yesterday's rise? or the rise itself? I would not doubt that there are many participants. But they are not individuals. Collectives must actually be in charge. Individuals would not move in unison unless there was a stimulus that was so great that the decision to either buy or sell was delivered en masse, and had no counter.
The individual investor (you and I) must be the slow trudge up the hill. If we are anything. The underlying current... the HODL effect. And I wonder how much of a blessing are we to the large organizations that move the stock for their immediate gain. And how detrimental it is to the company, AND the individual stock holders.

 

[Etna]

Fun:
VW ID.3 is already on the streets of Denmark "Order Yours Today"
https://twitter.com/mortenlund89/status/1270331078285447169

Cardboard neutral transportation.

 

[avoigt]

Yes, our own @avoigt discussed this here on TMC. I'll let him speak for himself, but I recall there was an issue of confidence on behalf of the founding Piëch family, who hold controlling interest in VW Group.

Cheers!

Diess statements from the Thursday management meeting has been leaked to the press. I did a tweet about it and Diess said that it will takes years for VW to get SW under control and that today hardly a line of code is written from VW.

Diess said its a legal infringement from the advisory board that this was leaked and then the situation escalated and some board member asked Diess to be fired from all roles. I believe that the just gave one of his CEO roles is a compromise and we will see if thats the beginning of the end.

 

[Cherry Wine]

I would like to believe that innocent perspective. if it were so then how to explain the sudden overnight stop of yesterday's rise? or the rise itself? I would not doubt that there are many participants. But they are not individuals. Collectives must actually be in charge. Individuals would not move in unison unless there was a stimulus that was so great that the decision to either buy or sell was delivered en masse, and had no counter.
The individual investor (you and I) must be the slow trudge up the hill. If we are anything. The underlying current... the HODL effect. And I wonder how much of a blessing are we to the large organizations that move the stock for their immediate gain. And how detrimental it is to the company, AND the individual stock holders.

Could be that an accumulator was driving up the price and took a breather. Could be that the approach to $1,000 triggered a bunch of traders' sell orders looking to make a quick buck. Could be manipulators working to stop the rise before they go underwater with their sold calls. Could be a combination of the above, or something else entirely.

The reality is that there's simply no way to know for certain unless you are able to discern the intent behind the actions of a critical mass of traders. All that leaves us is speculation.

 

[ZeApelido]

Personal experience?


Talking about BFR, people.

I don't have a good response, but I will tell you that my mind is so corrupt that it eventually landed on this story as a potential comeback:

Richard Gere and the Gerbil

 

[StealthP3D]

I think as long as the new product models continue to evolve, he’ll be suitably happy to continue. CYBRTRCK, Rocket Roadster, Robotaxis, Chinese littler car, solar roof 5.0, bajillion/kWh (KWH/Kw/KwH/wtfever) project that powers all of Russia and so on....

You can add one more item to that list:

As long as there are short-sellers attacking his company he will be driven to succeed. He's already decided life is boring checking out and living in a private 'paradise' so I can't fathom why people are thinking he might quit. Musk is not a quitter! It's not in his DNA.

Some may argue quitting is a realistic and valid concern. I think they are either being disingenuous or perhaps they simply don't understand something that should be obvious. The former is the polite interpretation.

 

[Causalien]

I don't like this at all. Market getting too frothy.