SPCE is currently being pumped by WSB. I don't know how I feel about it. LEAP's are cheap so it couldn't hurt to throw in with Richard Branson. No one else is (hypothetically) doing space tourism specifically, especially the low-orbit short duration variety of trip. Basically zero-G for 4 minutes catering to the rich, and judging from the amount of wealth inequality in the world right now, there are a LOT of bored rich people who would pay for that.
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What other tech stock to consider?
- Thread starter Sanny
- Start date
How is possible to invest in Social Capital? Do you need to be an accredited investor? Some of their companies do seem interesting.
Today's reminder that MSFT has been up like 300% in the past 5 years. You can't stop the Beast of Redmond. I've held a depressingly small stake of MSFT all this time, if it was a much bigger stake I would be a much wealthier man.
Also, this is amazing.
LORD OF THE CALLS : wallstreetbets
Also, this is amazing.
LORD OF THE CALLS : wallstreetbets
Eh. If SpaceX didn't exist, then perhaps I could get a bit more excited about SPCE. Eventually, SpaceX is highly likely to sell seats to space tourists, and the possibilities will be much more interesting than Virgin Galactic's offerings. I just wish we could acquire SpaceX shares without having to buy a mutual fund with a bunch of other holdings.
I agree. I would not have purchased the underlying Social Capital Hedosophia had I known it would morph into the controlling shareholder of Virgin Galactic.
From this exercise we learn what happens every now and then to a blind pig. Fun when truffles happen (see my avatar quote....)!
From this exercise we learn what happens every now and then to a blind pig. Fun when truffles happen (see my avatar quote....)!
Back here on TMC after a long hiatus. I remember our discussion on IPOA when we bought it years ago. Do you still hold it?
my IPOA got converted into SPCE.U. I will continue to keep them.
I guess if Virgin Galactic actually does their inaugural flight this year and Sir Richard Branson (now 70 years old) is on board and it doesn't crash or explode, then SPCE is going to quite literally reach orbit. Supposedly they have had a waiting list of 600+ pre-paid passengers at $200k and $250k a ticket since 2013 or so, including the late Stephen Hawking who didn't make it long enough to see the company reach commercial service and take his trip.
SPCE is a disaster waiting to happen but even PUTS have crazy premiums with the IV
this dumb meme stock SPCE has 100 million shares traded today almost
mblakele
FSD Beta (99)
I got off the SPCE train today. 80% gains in a few days, but I'm done. Good luck to the people who are going to try and ride this one into orbit!
I know, not investment advice, but care to name those 3 best gainers?
Well, I don't know if I'd buy them now since, like Tesla, they are near ATHs. I guess I should get off my butt and see if I should invest some more in them
PAYC, MA, NOW
One reason TSLA isn't as much of a gainer as these ones for me is that I've stupidly bought and sold TSLA over the years and not necessarily at the right time!
My point though is that there are some other good stocks out there. Unfortunately the thread here devoted to this topic gets very little use. The next time I find something I'll post there. I did post about BILL, but literally one day late (I found out about BILL the day of the earnings release so I didn't have time to post about it).
OK, here's a much longer investment thesis thingy.
tl;dr: get off your butts and start researching other stocks in addition to Tesla.
I've been spending far too much time in the Tesla Roundtable thread as TSLA has finally broken free. But it's kind of pointless and I am going to wean myself off it (this is my therapy post doing so). It's pointless because I'm a long term investor and as long as I think TSLA is a strong long term investment, what's the point about jabbering about daily price movements, when I could instead be finding other stocks to invest in.
Why would I want to do that? Let's look at the five year performance of TSLA versus four other stocks that are in my portfolio (and no, I didn't buy them all five years ago, but I sure wish I had). Color legend is top left, bottom volume is TSLA volume. This is a relative stock performance chart, ie. how much has each stock grown based on its price five years ago.
As you can see, if you ignore the last couple of months, all these other stocks did really well while TSLA languished. Even staid old Intuit increased 4x over five years, and that company even pays a dividend! I didn't include the lines 'cause the chart is complicated enough already, but the S&P 500 and NASDAQ went up 60% and 96% respectively during those period, so all these stocks are outperformers (and again, TSLA is only one due to the last couple of months).
I'm not dinging the TSLA long thesis. There is a strong argument to be made that the stock is finally reaching a fair price and if the market had any brains, the TSLA red line in the chart would look more like the blue or black one. Except of course for the minor point that Tesla almost went bankrupt at the start of the Model 3 production ramp, at least according, to, oh, some guy named Elon Musk (I think he was being a bit melodramatic when he said that, but who are you going to believe, me or him?).
Anyways, my point is that there are plenty of even better out performers out there to be buying in addition to TSLA. Had you bought these or other stocks like it, you would have been fine even if Tesla had indeed gone down the tubes. So, you would have made more money and done so with less risk. Isn't that what literally every investor in the world should be looking to do?
Now you might be thinking, well, of course you can cherry pick four stocks out of 500 that out perform TSLA. But I didn't cherry pick these stocks to make a point, these are stocks that I actually own. And it wasn't even hard to pick them.
Amazon. Anyone who buys growth stocks has had to have rocks in their head if they didn't buy Amazon somewhere along the line. I bought it in late 2016 and I feel like a total loser for not buying it earlier because it was freaking obvious even then that Amazon was going to own retail. All of it. And continue running 50%+ of Internet (AWS). I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole here, but you get my point. While Amazon had half of e-commerce revenues in 2018, that was only 5% of retail. With same day delivery, continually expanded product offerings, and AWS dominance, innovation and growth, I don't see this company slowing down for a while yet.
Mastercard. Ha! This and Visa are really staid, boring and almost incompetent companies. They managed to screw up the introduction of chip cards to the US (rest of world uses 2 factor pin codes for purchases, we inexplicably do not). They've dicked around trying to come up with an e-commerce payment system that makes sense even as literally everyone on the planet has a Visa or Mastercard (or linked account), and yet they still can't figure it out. And yet! They continue to be the defacto leaders in electronic payment (either Point Of Sale (POS) or e-commerce). It isn't even close. ApplePay you say? It uses credit cards! Every time someone uses ApplePay, Visa or Mastercard gets a cut. Same with Square! And Paypal! And Venmo! The first company to have a viable payment system, either POS or e-commerce (really, it has to work with both), that doesn't pay vast fees to MA or V, I'm buying them and dumping MA. But until then MA and V are riding the electronic payment boom.
Intuit. This software company has been around forever. But they make really sticky applications and services. By that I mean that once you start using Quicken or Quickbooks, you're stuck. I recently had a small business that I just sold. I used Quickbooks Online for the convenience of having a remote bookkeeper being able to easily access my accounting records. I think I started off paying $35/month. After six years, I was paying $70/month. Just under the pain threshold for me not to switch (I swear they measure these things). Switching away from an accounting system is really painful and people would much rather keep on paying $$ to avoid it. Intuit software isn't great, but as the old adage says, you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your companions. And Intuit manages to do that, hence their 4x return in five years.
Paycom. Unlike Intuit, these guys DO have great software for Payroll and Human Resources, and it's all web based, so they are in the red hot Software As A Service (SAAS) investment category (Intuit is slowly moving there too). They have a huge market opportunity still ahead of them. Probably the only reason they haven't been acquired by now is that their stock price is so rich ($18B market cap). Instead, they are no doubt writing a general accounting platform or something like that. Point is, lots of growth still ahead.
-----------------------------------------
My overall market thoughts:
Economists have been scratching their heads for a while now. Normally, when you are this far into a booming economy with such low unemployment rate, you have wage pressures that translates fairly quickly into inflation. Employers need to pay more to hire people, which increases costs, which increases goods and services prices, which, is kinda the definition of inflation. But we haven't seen inflation! What the heck is going on?
My theory (and I'm not an economist, so take this with disclaimers!) is that we are seeing the effects of productivity gains throughout the economy due to people deeply using the Internet. For example, not only has Uber made taxi services more efficient, but it has managed to get tons of part time Uber drivers off their butts and doing something useful for the economy. I swear most Uber drivers I talk to are literally doing this as a side gig to productively spend their time instead of sitting at home doing nothing important. People use their phones for most Internet interactions leaving their PCs gathering dust (or rather not buying one). Remember how we used to stand in line at a bank teller? Or even an ATM? People are going cashless now, and sending money to each other using Venmo or Zelle. I could go on and on, but the point is that on an economy wide basis, the economy has gotten much more efficient - it takes less capital and manpower to deliver the same or better goods and services, hence a booming economy with no inflation.
For an investment perspective, this means you should be looking for companies that are facilitating the transition of traditional services to the Internet. It is no accident that the top five US companies by market cap are technology companies. By the way, other market sectors could also be good, like biotech or healthcare, but I personally don't have enough knowledge to evaluate those sectors. If you do, by all means look for bargains wherever your expertise is.
------------------------------------------
Bargains are still here. As I've said in previous posts, look for IPOs or recent IPOs. Here's three, this time time shown against a 2 year TSLA chart (since they IPO'd just less than two years ago, and BILL less than a month ago).
I'm writing this post before I've gone back and looked at these companies since I bought them (which, again, I own). So this isn't a recommendation, but it is a recommendation to pull out their latest quarterly report and see if they are still good companies to own.
I'll just highlight DOCU since they essentially have a monopoly on electronic signatures. Their addressable market is huge, and the only reason I could be annoyed at them is that they don't seem to be moving fast enough. They really should be putting notary services out of business, let alone capturing a lot more of the document signature market.
-------------------------------------------
Isn't the market at an all time high?
Yes, but then it almost always is in a non-recessionary expansion. The tide will turn someday, and growth stocks will get hit harder than dividend paying stocks (one reason to also hold utilities and other dividend paying stocks). What I've found is that recessions usually have warning signs. A prudent investor will get out when those signs are obviously flashing (they aren't right now). We had plenty of warning before the 2000 and 2008 market sell offs. Are you gutsy enough to sell off your winners or at least curtail them when the signs start flashing red? If not, buying and holding isn't the worse thing to do, it may just take 5+ years for prices to get back to where they were depending on when you bought.
--------------------------------------------
Enough for now, hope this helps. I think it helped me, at least
tl;dr: get off your butts and start researching other stocks in addition to Tesla.
I've been spending far too much time in the Tesla Roundtable thread as TSLA has finally broken free. But it's kind of pointless and I am going to wean myself off it (this is my therapy post doing so). It's pointless because I'm a long term investor and as long as I think TSLA is a strong long term investment, what's the point about jabbering about daily price movements, when I could instead be finding other stocks to invest in.
Why would I want to do that? Let's look at the five year performance of TSLA versus four other stocks that are in my portfolio (and no, I didn't buy them all five years ago, but I sure wish I had). Color legend is top left, bottom volume is TSLA volume. This is a relative stock performance chart, ie. how much has each stock grown based on its price five years ago.
As you can see, if you ignore the last couple of months, all these other stocks did really well while TSLA languished. Even staid old Intuit increased 4x over five years, and that company even pays a dividend! I didn't include the lines 'cause the chart is complicated enough already, but the S&P 500 and NASDAQ went up 60% and 96% respectively during those period, so all these stocks are outperformers (and again, TSLA is only one due to the last couple of months).
I'm not dinging the TSLA long thesis. There is a strong argument to be made that the stock is finally reaching a fair price and if the market had any brains, the TSLA red line in the chart would look more like the blue or black one. Except of course for the minor point that Tesla almost went bankrupt at the start of the Model 3 production ramp, at least according, to, oh, some guy named Elon Musk (I think he was being a bit melodramatic when he said that, but who are you going to believe, me or him?).
Anyways, my point is that there are plenty of even better out performers out there to be buying in addition to TSLA. Had you bought these or other stocks like it, you would have been fine even if Tesla had indeed gone down the tubes. So, you would have made more money and done so with less risk. Isn't that what literally every investor in the world should be looking to do?
Now you might be thinking, well, of course you can cherry pick four stocks out of 500 that out perform TSLA. But I didn't cherry pick these stocks to make a point, these are stocks that I actually own. And it wasn't even hard to pick them.
Amazon. Anyone who buys growth stocks has had to have rocks in their head if they didn't buy Amazon somewhere along the line. I bought it in late 2016 and I feel like a total loser for not buying it earlier because it was freaking obvious even then that Amazon was going to own retail. All of it. And continue running 50%+ of Internet (AWS). I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole here, but you get my point. While Amazon had half of e-commerce revenues in 2018, that was only 5% of retail. With same day delivery, continually expanded product offerings, and AWS dominance, innovation and growth, I don't see this company slowing down for a while yet.
Mastercard. Ha! This and Visa are really staid, boring and almost incompetent companies. They managed to screw up the introduction of chip cards to the US (rest of world uses 2 factor pin codes for purchases, we inexplicably do not). They've dicked around trying to come up with an e-commerce payment system that makes sense even as literally everyone on the planet has a Visa or Mastercard (or linked account), and yet they still can't figure it out. And yet! They continue to be the defacto leaders in electronic payment (either Point Of Sale (POS) or e-commerce). It isn't even close. ApplePay you say? It uses credit cards! Every time someone uses ApplePay, Visa or Mastercard gets a cut. Same with Square! And Paypal! And Venmo! The first company to have a viable payment system, either POS or e-commerce (really, it has to work with both), that doesn't pay vast fees to MA or V, I'm buying them and dumping MA. But until then MA and V are riding the electronic payment boom.
Intuit. This software company has been around forever. But they make really sticky applications and services. By that I mean that once you start using Quicken or Quickbooks, you're stuck. I recently had a small business that I just sold. I used Quickbooks Online for the convenience of having a remote bookkeeper being able to easily access my accounting records. I think I started off paying $35/month. After six years, I was paying $70/month. Just under the pain threshold for me not to switch (I swear they measure these things). Switching away from an accounting system is really painful and people would much rather keep on paying $$ to avoid it. Intuit software isn't great, but as the old adage says, you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your companions. And Intuit manages to do that, hence their 4x return in five years.
Paycom. Unlike Intuit, these guys DO have great software for Payroll and Human Resources, and it's all web based, so they are in the red hot Software As A Service (SAAS) investment category (Intuit is slowly moving there too). They have a huge market opportunity still ahead of them. Probably the only reason they haven't been acquired by now is that their stock price is so rich ($18B market cap). Instead, they are no doubt writing a general accounting platform or something like that. Point is, lots of growth still ahead.
-----------------------------------------
My overall market thoughts:
Economists have been scratching their heads for a while now. Normally, when you are this far into a booming economy with such low unemployment rate, you have wage pressures that translates fairly quickly into inflation. Employers need to pay more to hire people, which increases costs, which increases goods and services prices, which, is kinda the definition of inflation. But we haven't seen inflation! What the heck is going on?
My theory (and I'm not an economist, so take this with disclaimers!) is that we are seeing the effects of productivity gains throughout the economy due to people deeply using the Internet. For example, not only has Uber made taxi services more efficient, but it has managed to get tons of part time Uber drivers off their butts and doing something useful for the economy. I swear most Uber drivers I talk to are literally doing this as a side gig to productively spend their time instead of sitting at home doing nothing important. People use their phones for most Internet interactions leaving their PCs gathering dust (or rather not buying one). Remember how we used to stand in line at a bank teller? Or even an ATM? People are going cashless now, and sending money to each other using Venmo or Zelle. I could go on and on, but the point is that on an economy wide basis, the economy has gotten much more efficient - it takes less capital and manpower to deliver the same or better goods and services, hence a booming economy with no inflation.
For an investment perspective, this means you should be looking for companies that are facilitating the transition of traditional services to the Internet. It is no accident that the top five US companies by market cap are technology companies. By the way, other market sectors could also be good, like biotech or healthcare, but I personally don't have enough knowledge to evaluate those sectors. If you do, by all means look for bargains wherever your expertise is.
------------------------------------------
Bargains are still here. As I've said in previous posts, look for IPOs or recent IPOs. Here's three, this time time shown against a 2 year TSLA chart (since they IPO'd just less than two years ago, and BILL less than a month ago).
I'm writing this post before I've gone back and looked at these companies since I bought them (which, again, I own). So this isn't a recommendation, but it is a recommendation to pull out their latest quarterly report and see if they are still good companies to own.
I'll just highlight DOCU since they essentially have a monopoly on electronic signatures. Their addressable market is huge, and the only reason I could be annoyed at them is that they don't seem to be moving fast enough. They really should be putting notary services out of business, let alone capturing a lot more of the document signature market.
-------------------------------------------
Isn't the market at an all time high?
Yes, but then it almost always is in a non-recessionary expansion. The tide will turn someday, and growth stocks will get hit harder than dividend paying stocks (one reason to also hold utilities and other dividend paying stocks). What I've found is that recessions usually have warning signs. A prudent investor will get out when those signs are obviously flashing (they aren't right now). We had plenty of warning before the 2000 and 2008 market sell offs. Are you gutsy enough to sell off your winners or at least curtail them when the signs start flashing red? If not, buying and holding isn't the worse thing to do, it may just take 5+ years for prices to get back to where they were depending on when you bought.
--------------------------------------------
Enough for now, hope this helps. I think it helped me, at least
Great post! Nice work, Cosmacelf.
Indeed, I do have rocks in my head because I didn’t buy AMZN in 2014-15. About that time, I read an article in the New Yorker that detailed Bezo’s strategy and was incredibly accurate in calling their future dominance. I’m still trying to find it but it doesn’t matter as it was burned into my brain and I told anyone that would listen about this article. And yet, I didn’t buy the stock. WTF.
But hey, I could do this all day. When I was 12 I saved up all summer sweeping floors so I could buy an Apple //e with the works. If I’d have just bought AAPL I could have skipped college and went straight to retirement!
Been loving the TSLA ride though so it’s all good.
Indeed, I do have rocks in my head because I didn’t buy AMZN in 2014-15. About that time, I read an article in the New Yorker that detailed Bezo’s strategy and was incredibly accurate in calling their future dominance. I’m still trying to find it but it doesn’t matter as it was burned into my brain and I told anyone that would listen about this article. And yet, I didn’t buy the stock. WTF.
But hey, I could do this all day. When I was 12 I saved up all summer sweeping floors so I could buy an Apple //e with the works. If I’d have just bought AAPL I could have skipped college and went straight to retirement!
Been loving the TSLA ride though so it’s all good.
I agree that a diversified portfolio ought to include either Visa or MasterCard. Here is my own portfolio position. Contrary to scuttlebutt, my graphing capabilities are superior to that of a drunk bonobo.
Purchased on Dec. 8, 2011 at $24.23 and as of today, at $211.45, with a modest dividend of 0.56%, thus presenting a total return of just about exactly 10X in effectively 9 years:
And overlaid against my positions in Tesla, uncorrected for purchase times but beginning in March, 2013:
Does my position in Visa cause me to sleep well at night? Yes. Am I confident it will continue to do well? Yes. Is it the stock market's definition of a moneymaker? Yes. Has it outperformed Tesla? Hell, no! BUT.....until mid-2019, the greater volatility of TSLA made that answer a touch-and-go. And at any time during Tesla's wandering in the woods (2013-2019, roughly), Visa way outperformed it.
Anyone who can log-10 the y-axis...please do so ==>or suggest where I can find such a program<==. It would make for a far more appropriate set of charts.
Purchased on Dec. 8, 2011 at $24.23 and as of today, at $211.45, with a modest dividend of 0.56%, thus presenting a total return of just about exactly 10X in effectively 9 years:
And overlaid against my positions in Tesla, uncorrected for purchase times but beginning in March, 2013:
Does my position in Visa cause me to sleep well at night? Yes. Am I confident it will continue to do well? Yes. Is it the stock market's definition of a moneymaker? Yes. Has it outperformed Tesla? Hell, no! BUT.....until mid-2019, the greater volatility of TSLA made that answer a touch-and-go. And at any time during Tesla's wandering in the woods (2013-2019, roughly), Visa way outperformed it.
Anyone who can log-10 the y-axis...please do so ==>or suggest where I can find such a program<==. It would make for a far more appropriate set of charts.
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Agreed. Software/the internet, is eating up the real world piece by piece.
For me, I wasn't in a position to trade much in the way of individual stocks back in 2016 or I would have gone more into Amazon. I watched the company go nuts when I was like 18 or so. As far as Tesla, I find it easier because Tesla is undervalued (or was) and I have personal knowledge of it. I don't like investing in companies without that edge. Great post thanks.
That's friggin hilarious.
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