I can see a case where you might say if it crashed like it should that someone might think it over corrected and so people started buying the other end of that trying to buy it up cheaply and then there’s another wave or two up and down.
But it didn’t even go down. so far I know it’s only aftermarket. During the last quarter they revised the projected revenue downward five times and it still came in on the lowest projection by a decent margin. People were expecting awful revenue and yet it still surprised people would just how awful it was.
Literally any other stock where we got the same news like this would have fallen 30 or 40% right off the bat. But with Tesla? up 5%.
It may be a different story tomorrow but there was a decent aftermarket volume around 20 million.
It just seems like Tesla is completely inverse to what any rational person would expect. If there’s bad news it goes up. If there’s very bad news it goes straight up. Given that predictable pattern it seems like you’ll be able to make money off of it simply by following that rule. And I probably should try to do that. But it disturbs my sense of reality and anything making sense and it’s really hard for me to make a bet that just is the complete opposite of what every logical argument and evidence would point you towards.
I started that a little bit. It’s complete nonsense but I threw like five or $6,000 into a call over the next 3 days so that if Tesla goes up 50 or 100% based on having a horrible news which I think is not unlikely then at least I could recover some of my losses. Even that sounds completely insane to me and I guess I should just get out of the Tesla business because it seems only to exist to make a mockery of our financial system.
Could you imagine if Amazon or Google or Apple came in with the earnings report like this? They’d send Tim apple right to El Salvador. it would be like an execution, a funeral for the stock. Tesla though? apparently something to celebrate.
I know I’m kind of a broken record on Tesla so I’m sorry I’ll try not to post too much about it the next couple of days but I just can’t make sense of it and no one else can either.
At this point I think it might be more likely to hit 300 than 200 and I can’t find any other way to say how insane that is.
I just thought of something: I know that when you’re far enough from retirement like me (at least 15 years), you’re advised not to pay down your mortgage with extra cash because the money would probably do better invested.
With the current uncertainty, might this actually be a good time to take the money I’d usually put into an IRA or index fund and use it for my mortgage principal, at least while current conditions in DC persist? Or is it still a bad idea?
It’s never a bad idea to pay off debt no matter what’s going on.
But as an investment, with a 15 year horizon, it’s probably better to invest it in index funds right now. The current uncertainty won’t be current or uncertain in 15 years. All the companies you’re investing in will still be around making money.
But more importantly, he and various cronies get to front-run it. Normal things like CEOs announcing resignations or acquisitions or such produce small spikes or valleys in small things. The kinds of announcements he is being allowed to get away with move the whole world. A bunch.
Whole lotta ways to make a whole lotta money front-running something like that. Good thing there are diligent regulatory agencies totally on top of any signs of front-running. Oh, … wait.
Well today went about as I expected which I should’ve actually put my money behind but I just couldn’t bet something that made so little defense. I did put in a substantial 2 day call as a hedge that’s up $4000 but even with that I’m way down on the day.
But if I’m seeing a pattern, it’s going to decline over the next week back to 224. So…new puts. Tesla has become my white whale.
That story turned out well for Captain Ahab, right?
I wanted to know whether, when you do your taxes, you have sufficient deductions that you take the separate deductions or the standard deduction that’s available to everyone. Because if you itemize, then you can deduct your mortgage interest which has the effect of reducing your interest rate by your marginal rate. The standard deduction is $15,000 for a single person, $30,000 for a married couple. So you have to have more in mortgage interest, state & local taxes, charitable contributions, etc. than the standard deduction. And, note that state and local taxes are capped at $10,000.
At 6% I think a case can be made that reducing your debt is going to yield a better return (6%, compounded monthly) in the short term, due to the massive uncertainty. But I want to stress that this is only because I think we’ve pretty much guaranteed a shit year this year, and money markets are only paying around 4%.
However, bear in mind: The S&P 500 has returned an annual average return of 10.5% with dividends reinvested going all the way back to 1929. So that includes some pretty tough periods like the 30s and the 70s. Unless something fundamentally changes (cough international trade cough) you will be better off there over the long haul.
Also bear in mind that money saved can be spent later, but mortgage reduction cannot. That is, paying off your mortgage increases your wealth but in a not very liquid way.
It’s important to realize this is a sliding scale. It’s not as if, the moment you exceed the standard deduction, you can suddenly deduct all of your mortgage interest! You can only deduct the margin by which your itemized deductions exceed the standard deduction. For most people this means very little, or often none at all.
Always used to annoy me when ‘financial experts’ would drone on about what a great tax break this was, as if they were letting you in on a Big Secret.
So the markets rallied yesterday because Trump said we’re making his progress negotiating with China. Then today China comes out and says that’s all a lie and no one has talked, so the market… Rallies again?
The Chinese representative has reiterated that they do not want a trade war. Trump is saying he is going to “be nice” … and huge numbers of people are trying to trade the bumps. It sounds like Trump is looking for a way to save face and find a way to declare that his actual plan is working just fine.
It is all reacting to “news” of the moment, buying the rumor, and trying to outguess the next random bounce. Somebody’s making a lot of money. Somebody’s losing a lot.
However, for those states that levy an income tax, this might very well make a difference in your tax liability. For instance, my state of Kansas has a relatively small standard deduction. A large mortgage interest, plus personal property tax on your vehicles, plus charitable contributions and/or other deductions, can sometimes exceed the state standard deduction. As a result, you might save some dollars on the state tax. Not a lot, but some.
In a way it’s more sad than annoying. These ‘experts’ have only a few themes which they just parrot endlessly. Another popular one is how you get a higher amount of social security by delaying claiming until a later age. None of this is in any way esoteric and can all be found quite easily from public sources.
But I guess some people are intimidated by financial planning, so ‘advisors’ make a living.
I mean, of course the net benefit is the delta between the standard deduction and the itemized deduction, but until the tax changes in Trump 1 the joint standard deduction was somewhere around $12,600. Here in Boston, a $500,000 mortgage ($14k interest / yr), 5% income tax (two incomes, $10k/yr easily), property taxes of $10k/yr, would be pretty common, and you’re at three times the old SD. Before getting into the little things like excise taxes and charitable donations.
