Today started quite nice. Limit-Buys were triggered on Nike, Alphabet and S&P Global. Some other stocks are getting close to do some ECA (Euro-Cost-Averaging), and I'm quite excited about this downturn in the market. One of those stocks getting close is Tesla, which is getting hammered thanks to Elon Musk's involvement in politics (and resulting disaster-numbers in sales).
So, as every morning, I checked CNBC among other financial websites to see if something really exciting was happening, and found myself with this headline:
And then it dawned to me. This is all a genius play by Elon Musk. After first convincing all the left-winged to buy his cars because they're EVs and will save the planet and such, he now found a way to have all the right-winged people buy his cards in order to support him and President Trump. Even the president himself is buying a Tesla! And considering the cult-like status that seems to be establishing around Trump and his cabinet, it is indeed likely that more will follow.
So, now there will be way more Tesla on the road, from a different part of the society, with different habits - just the data that Musk wants to improve is Self-Driving-Software! Diversity is important when collecting data, you need to get the best average with the most outliers to both sides to cover it all.
And there is more. By establishing himself as a hated figure, he puts Tesla in the cross-hairs of vandalism and destruction. For used Teslas, the destruction means that they won't hit the used-car-market and lower prices there. For the new cars, it means he will cash on the insurance. So, he doesn't even need to sell as many cars, they will be destroyed, but he gets the money anyway, without going through the trouble of warranty and sales. Again, genius! Somewhat evil, though, but forget it, Jake, it's capitalism.
Towards Tesla stock: My average is 170€. I never got to build the position to where I usually have my highly-volatile ones, so I might buy some more below 200€ - not sure though, since some other companies like Amazon and Alphabet are getting very, very cheap, as well as my other growth positions. And Tesla is not really in the best spot, business wise. I'll analyze a little more when it's below the 200€.
I don't quite go into politics when buying companies, but what I think they will be worth in the future, no matter what happens in government. Also, and this is interesting, I'm a lot less coherent with my values when buying stocks. I own an oil company while considering myself somewhat environmentalist (no car, vegan, re/upcycler and so on). I own a credit card company though I hate what credit cards do to people and local economies. It's odd. I haven't really found a reason yet to why I'm not as strict on my stocks as I am on my life.