If you had bought 8 years ago and sold after the first double or triple, you'd have the same confirmation bias problem as if you'd never bought at all.
Most people would find reasons why they were right to sell and forgo all the 10x's after they sold. They'd be on HN talking about speculation, tulips, buying drugs on the internet, terrorist financing, and wasteful energy usage.
I'm not immune from this. I bought Tesla and Netflix early, and sold after the first triple. Then I spent a lot of time finding fault with Tesla and Netflix as they continued to rise without limit while I watched from the sidelines.
I was wrong about Tesla and Netflix. I made tremendous errors in judgment by selling far too soon.
At least for me, it's much easier to pretend I've been right all along and the entire market is wrong, than to admit my own judgment and decisions were faulty.
I thought really hard about every single aspect, from the inevitability of the EV transition, to the fundamentals of the company, to the brilliant people that work at Tesla, to various macroeconomic trends, to virology, to value investors vs. innovators, to the 2019 yield curve inversion, to a snap prediction that the Fed would pump hard so as not to repeat what they thought of as mistakes from 2007-2008, etc.
And even then it took me some time to go all-in on the company. I made a good amount short-term on a couple of casino stocks, and gains on Apple, Amazon, etc. But I dumped them all, one by one, to buy more Tesla.
Thanks for being honest, far too many people cannot admit they are wrong and double down and call Tesla a fraud only making them look worse in the future. I've certainly been wrong about companies before. I shorted AAPL for a week in 2002.
Well the market can be terribly wrong on many companies in the long run, both undervaluing great companies and overvaluing terrible companies. Tesla's vision is for the next 20 years, not the last 5.
Historical performance is also not an indicator of future performance. Everyday I'm holding onto the shares is the same as if I made the decision to buy that many shares on that day. If anything the fantastic return would encourage long term investors so far to partially cash out and diversify their risk a bit.
This is otherwise known as the greater fool theory. I'm not saying that to suggest you're a fool. But you are a gambler, hoping for someone even more emotionally invested than you are to buy your shares. At the end of the day confidence is not sustainable. The bubble showed us that quite clearly. At some point, Tesla has to make sense, and there has to be a clear path from now until then or someone will lose a lot of money along the way.
No intelligent person would have held until now so there's nothing to regret
It sounds counterintuitive since obviously you must be a genius if you foresaw the current valuation and held right?
But there is no way anyone would have reasonably predicted Tesla being worth 4,000 a share by 2021 no matter how sure you were Tesla was going to obsolete every other carmaker.
The only way you could have held this long was a naive strategy of holding indefinitely refusing to take profits no matter how volatile things got because you see Musk as the messiah or something...
Which is a pretty foolish trading strategy to apply to 1/3rd of your holdings in a single ticker...
The problem is that the future is uncertain, and price is guided by feelings and impressions. People think Tesla is a great company for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with math. They trust Elon Musk, they think Tesla has a technological advantage, etc. Of course a lot of people also look at balance sheets and hard facts before making a purchase. The price of Tesla's stock is composed of the coordinated actions of all these people. It turns out that adhering to your narrow idea of value does not help you accurately predict the price of a stock, or even the market as a whole for that matter.
Agree with the conclusion, disagree with the reasoning.
In the end, good products and strategies win. Betting against Tesla is dumb because they've proven the doubters wrong about their products and strategies over and over again. They've stayed right on course with the ten-year plan they laid out ten years ago, and every product they've built has been loved by an overwhelming majority of its owners. Not many companies can say that, not even successful ones.
Short sellers need to tip their caps and recognize that Tesla understands what it's doing better than they do. The longer it takes them to realize this, the more money they're going to lose.
If it were known that Tesla would jump this much it would have cost what it costs now at that point.
The fin market is great at exposing human biases about decision making. There are now still hundreds of stocks that will jump 100% in the next 6 months ready for the taking: why aren't you buying those? Because you don't know which ones will!
Yeah as I said I don't hold Tesla. I was long on it as I sold it years ago. Could've made more money if I held on to it, but I was not smart enough to realize what the global economy was doing to tech stocks, and not dumb enough to think Tesla actually was going to have any sort of intrinsic value close to their market cap.
The problem is the purposeful deceit that causes retail investors to incorrectly assess risk. It's common in investor/public relations so I don't mind that Tesla and Musk do it better than everyone else.
Yes, but you could also have invested your money elsewhere and continued to see growth.
Except for the complexity involving taxes and fees, if your money sits in Tesla shares for a long time and the stock stays flat, then you've lost money. Both in terms of opportunity cost and through inflation.
In the real world, I've been listening to people like you predict Tesla's failure for ten million increasingly humorous reasons for 10 years, while I've watched my stock go up twelve times over.
Most people would find reasons why they were right to sell and forgo all the 10x's after they sold. They'd be on HN talking about speculation, tulips, buying drugs on the internet, terrorist financing, and wasteful energy usage.
I'm not immune from this. I bought Tesla and Netflix early, and sold after the first triple. Then I spent a lot of time finding fault with Tesla and Netflix as they continued to rise without limit while I watched from the sidelines.
I was wrong about Tesla and Netflix. I made tremendous errors in judgment by selling far too soon.
At least for me, it's much easier to pretend I've been right all along and the entire market is wrong, than to admit my own judgment and decisions were faulty.
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