Let us all know what you figure out!
Seriously, I’m in the same boat. I was just about ready to liquidate a goodly portion of my mutuals until the job report was released today. Now suddenly the Dow is up 279 after being down over 300 this morning.
Traditional short selling you don’t buy the $100 stock at all. You borrow the stock from someone who owns it (for a small fee) and then sell it for $100 a share. If the price drops to (e.g.) $80 a share, you then buy it and give it back to the entity you borrowed it from, and keep the $20.
That is the crux of the matter, fer shure. 
OK, that makes sense. How do you find someone willing to let you borrow the stock? A dating site for stockholders? StockBay?
It’s academic for me, since I only have my 401(k). Even if I knew how to find someone to ‘borrow’ stock from, and how to sell it, and how to buy it back, and how to give it back to the lender, I couldn’t do it because there’s no ‘Short Sell Fund’ option.
Sort of. That’s basically what E*Trade or any other brokerage account is. Your not directly trading stocks. You do it through intermediaries at the brokerage who do the matching of buyers and sellers for you.
For options and shorting stock, I believe you need to open a margin account to place the short sell order. The brokerage will then find you the shares that you borrowed. You sell the shares at a higher price. When the price drops to a lower price, you buy the same number of shares back and the brokerage returns them to the borrower, closing the position.
In reality, you wont experience “infinite losses”. But if the value of the borrowed shares increases to more than the maintenance margin (25% IIRC) they brokerage might issue a “margin call” forcing you to add more equity or close out the position at a loss.[quote=“Johnny_L.A, post:44, topic:1015169, full:true”]
If I had it all figured out I’d be rich and not working instead of lugging my ass to some Wall Street bank trying to help them build these stupid systems.
I bought Spotify in 2022 for about $75/share. Today it’s worth $532/share. 560% + gain. Pure luck, put little thought into it other than I liked Spotify.
I only bought 1 share. It was for my nephew on his birthday. I could have bought many shares, but that would have been dumb. Right now, knowing what I know, it still would have been dumb.
Looks like the market was headed for a sizable loss Friday after the jobs report came out (it was positive, but not quite as good as had been forecast earlier).
Then Jerome Powell of the Fed made a supposedly reassuring statement about how the economy is in good shape with inflation limited, and he didn’t see the need to do anything about interest rates for awhile. So the market made a decent gain.
Most likely “investors” will have the weekend to digest this, realize Powell’s statement means no interest rate cuts anytime soon and omigod the economy is gonna crash so sell sell sell. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a big downturn Monday (this has happened before).
It discourages having retirement money in any form of investment that’s prey to the insecurities and panics of these short-sighted lemmings.
Yeah, didn’t have the big crash I was expecting, but that’s not a bad reason to expect it to come Monday. I more or less broke even for the day. Tesla was down $10 earlier and I was having a nice day but then it recovered. But I’m going to keep everything in place for Monday. I have a few puts down that don’t expire for 2-3 more weeks.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, it will take a while - potentially years - for most impacts of tariffs to hit the shelves. That’s the tail end, to be sure, but even the head of the monster may still lag tariff enactments by a few months (depending on the products affected).
Once that happens, the Fed will need to collect enough numbers to be confident and to guess the scale of the issue, before starting to raise the interest rates. That may, on its own, to take another couple of months past where you start to feel discomfort from walking into your local markets.
I wouldn’t expect the Fed to kick in for 6-12 months.
It’s a good time to renegotiate your mortgage, btw, if the current rate is lower than when you purchased.
Why would tariffs take years to show their effect? Just in time production means shit is constantly flowing in. No company is going to eat the added costs. A bunch of companies bought a lot of foreign supply before the tariffs kicked in, so that may buy us a month or two of mitigating the damage, but I don’t see why we won’t be feeling most of the impact in 3 months.
Let’s say that you’re a legacy owner of a pencil factory. It’s not really a growth market, you don’t have any big ideas on how to diversify or start new businesses, all the ML engineers are working for big tech, Walmart, and Costco, and you’re pretty happy just collecting a check to keep your pot collection going.
Are you probably upgrading to just in time production?
Yessssss you guys, Elon’s money
Tesla down $40. I have had 25k in shorting at $265 and a $245 put and another 20k in TSLZ (2x invert).
Yup, as mentioned above I put some money in TSDD which is a Tesla 1.5x invert. As of today it is up 116.70%. I’m loving it.
And great for you. Seriously though - are instruments like that “investing”?
As much as any ETF is I suppose. It seems to be similar to shorting a stock so if that’s investing I guess it is. And if I’m able to more than double my money in such a short period I’m not going to complain.
Oh I wouldn’t complain either. I love winning a bet. And maybe this is being pedantic or something but shorting doesn’t seem to be investing to my take. It might sometimes be a tool to support investment, in a hedging sort of way, maybe?
I worked as a runner at the Chicago Board of Trade back between High School and college. Most people buying a selling contracts were serving an economic function by their willingness to take the risk off the hands of the producers and consumers of the products. But they weren’t investing as they did it.
I admit to not really understanding the ins and outs of all of this as well as someone with your experience would. But I certainly enjoy making money off of Elroy’s misery as Tesla stock tanks.
I claim and possess no special expertise. I’m really just wondering? The complaint of some that investing is gambling is generally dismissed easily.
My friend suggested that I cash out my earnings, but I think he’s just in denial a little bit about how bad things are because he doesn’t want to acknowledge that republican policies are economically wrecking the country. Nah, I’m gonna ride this bitch into the ground. Tesla has been propped up by cultists for a decade now, and once a stock gets big enough it’s basically guaranteed to go bigger simply because the big institutional investors start owning it through stuff like market indexes. Growth sprung up on its claims of being a tech company rather than an auto manufacturer. “Full self driving is going to be available this year” was said every year for the last 8 years. A massive fleet of self-driving Tesla taxis will revolutionize transport! Everyone will be using our solar panels and batteries in a few years! We’re working on humanoid robots! All bullshit. The fucking cybertruck is more representative of Tesla than any of that shit, a wildly overpriced piece of shit meme vehicle.
The world is turning against Elon, no one is buying Teslas anymore, lots of people are calling the emporer naked, and finally the massive, absurd bubble is finally going to collapse. I’m riding this Tesla collapse all the way down to $50.