The German Handelsblatt, something like our Financial Times or our Wall Street Journal, reports regularly about Cathie Woods (link in German) who, it seems, is very good at self promoting and/or investing in risky tech. She seems to hodl hold around 700-800 million US$ worth of tesla stock, 70 million bought just last month.
Is this volume enough to keep tesla from falling? It seems little to me for a company worth ~1 trillion. Today’s turnover in tesla shares in Nasdaq was 16.2 billion, and that is around 1.5% of the total stock available and 20 times more than what she bought last month.
Just trying to understand how this stock can still rise.
Las Vegas is physical proof that is true.
I have never been a gold bug, but between Trump’s determination to cut interest rates, and the Republican obsession with cutting taxes, and Trump’s demonstrated desire to fudge economic numbers, plus all the tariff nonsense, plus the concerning influence of crypto bros on this administration - I feel like we have all the makings of an inflationary storm. A hurricane, really. So I’m looking at gold more closely than I ever have.
If I were prone to conspiracy, I’d say that the crypto bros and gold bugs are influencing Trump to weaken the dollar and strengthen their own holdings. I still wonder about what Trump’s fieldtrip to Fort Knox gold reserve was really about, but it’s unsettling.
I’ve thought about gold from time to time. But I have a sort of innate reluctance to buy anything that does not produce at least some dividend related to business activity. Gold of course is pure speculation.
I may come to regret this…
Those would be my thoughts in normal times, but we’re facing a government that appears determined to create hyperinflation. It’s hard to value a dividend that’s paid in dollars if the value of the dollar itself seems in doubt.
But if that’s the case, it doesn’t really need to be gold, other physical commodities should work. I’m glad I own my home outright.
Cathy Woods has a really terrible track record. Yes, good at self promoting, especially amongst the SF/tech crowd, but she’s awful at actually investing.
Her ARKK ETF did spectacularly during the pandemic, beating every other taker during the bubble, which is what I think floated her influencer stock up to the top. But I would agree that the rest of their ETFs seemed unspectacular, and there’s plenty of other ETFs with a similar basket of tech stocks and that could just as likely have been the “most”. One of those had to do the best.
Hitting a home run over and over again makes you a genius. Getting one once is just luck.
But I certainly don’t begrudge her having capitalized on the attention. Her job is to make money for herself and her company, not necessarily for ETF holders. So long as the total headcount of customers of Ark Invest products goes up, I’d assume that she’s running a good business. A successful product is just good advertising for the rest of the products.
I just find this interesting going back to April; this was during the liberation day meltdown. It’s at $585 today. 26% gain. It won’t hang out this high too long, and I didn’t buy it for short-term, but this was a solid buy regardless.
Today it doesn’t feel all that controversial of a buy to me, but it did at the time. It was literally a meltdown. I had to write down how it felt at the time because I knew I’d forget the feeling. I trusted it was a good buy based on principle, but it did test my investing philosophy quite a lot due to all the noise.
The noise can be deafening. Since the election, I had to step away from the day to day. It’s actually easier, for me, to invest knowing less about the world these days. Trust the process and all that.
Late: I should add, I had bought a lot more pre-liberation day. That was all much tougher to go through the meltdown and trust the process - the feelings of both buys are intermingled. That buy is up about 12%.
VOO is my mainstay, I’ve been buying it for years
Trust in VOO
VOO will provide.
Yup, a lot of our assets are in VOO too.
Until a couple of years ago I used to try to be an active investor. Spent a lot of time looking at fundementals, crunching numbers, reading reports etc. But backtesting, I would have been better off just putting almost all available investment money into index funds.
Such is life…
As I mentioned upthread, I was mostly in S&P 500 until liberation day, when I moved some to a European index fund just in case the US economy goes completely off the rails.
That said, the market doesn’t seem to care what Trump does.
I mean VOO is up 8.7% YTD while VEA is up 21.3%. Probably partially due to what Trump does.
This resonates!
The two lessons of investing I first absorbed were “Don’t follow the crowd” and “Get out before boom goes to bust.” I hate that these lessons still exert such a powerful pull, since – as you know – they have been discredited by the success of buy-and-hold index-investing.
There was an article two days ago in the Atlantic that claimed that perhaps it is precisely this index investing that is distorting the markt upwards:
I am not sure, but something unusual is happening when the market seems to only go up, come good or bad news. This could be an explanation.
I’ve heard a lot of this recently. You also have the rise of the 401k, to where some significant percentage of all payrolls just automatically flow into markets every week. It would be interesting to know how much 401k money is deposited each week.
Of course for those of us of a certain age, some portion of our 401K money is cashed out to buy groceries and pay the rent each month.
Would someone explain back-loaded Variable Annuities to me? I’m confused about how these actually work. Googling a bit, it seems the investor surrenders their initial investment for some period before it is available for withdrawal. Apparently growth from this initial investment is available for withdrawal, but not the “principal” (or whatever it’s called). Are there other fees for withdrawing investment growth? Is there a standard amount of time before the investor has access to their “initial” money? The initial investment amount is (supposedly) safe from market downturns, and apparently there’s some way to increase that “safe” amount periodically for a fee. Does this reset the clock for being able to withdraw your now-increased initial investment?
FTR: I’m not investing in these, just got pounced on by my Dad’s financial guy last time I visited. Due to the intensity of the sales push, I rejected the idea but am still curious about them.
Finance guy has convinced my Dad to put most of his money in these back-loaded annuities. Based on what little I understand, these seem like a poor choice for someone in their 90s.
Any information or opinions would be welcome.
Annuities? Just Say No. From Wikipedia:
“Variable annuities have been criticized for their high commissions, contingent deferred sale charges, tax deferred growth, high taxes on profits, and high annual costs. Sales abuses became so prevalent that in November 2007, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved FINRA Rule 2821[10] requiring brokers to determine specific suitability criteria when recommending the purchase or exchange (but not the surrender) of deferred variable annuities.”
Sounds to me as if your dad should get a more reliable finance guy ASAP.
The only annuity that has made good sense to me is one that I am effectively buying by deferring social security until 70.
But there must be some circumstances that they are decent choices for? Highly highly highly doubt that a man already 90 is going be that exceptional circumstance.
I’m just a dog on the Internet, but every time I’ve looked at annuities I haven’t been sold on them. If they’re variable then I may as well just buy a mutual fund/ETF myself. If they’re a guaranteed value per payment then…how does that respond to inflation? I don’t want to get poorer as I become more decrepit.
Unless you really doubt your own ability to ignore “the big pile of cash” that you’ve set aside as investments, until you’re ready to retire, then there’s no advantage. You can start a ROTH or 401k - which will penalize you for early withdrawals, but don’t fully stop you from committing them, and invest without capital gains taxes while trading investments around inside the account (there can be a tax effect when you add or remove money from the account).
Only if you really doubt yourself, is there any reason to give it all to someone else. In that case, I would expect that you can find a trustworthy annuity vendor - even if many are scams. But you should take care that there’s no knowing how much money that will actually result in giving you, in the future. Paying in frequently is your best security against future downturns in the market.