Investing General Discussion

At this rate Tesla, a car manufacturer producing 100k vehicles a year, will be worth double the value of General Motors and Toyota.

For those interested. Earnings season has begun.
Things start getting interesting next week. Banks and Financials begin next week. Plus DAL.

Anything associated with transport sector getting annihilated today. It was bad before the SCOTUS ruling with Trump's taxes and then went off the cliff. Half a dozen governors have the ability to cripple travel to the biggest metro areas in our country. And the House allows it instead of asserting their absolute right over interstate commerce because "Orange Man Bad". Externalities are the biggest challenge to investing. Reading financial statements is the easy part.

Wingz said:

NFIN went down..bought some shares..I think it's still a good buy.

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Its the only SPAC I am currentky holding. I like the merger partner, I just hope they formalize it.

For anyone looking to invest long term but don't particularly like the vakuations on tech stocks, peek at the aerospace industry. Its being hammered because it shares indexes with airlines and other transportation stocks but doesn't have a lot of exposure to Coronachan. Some quality names are getting into areas that are bargain-like.

LMT
GD
NOC
RTX

All have solid bakance sheets and cash flows. They pay a decent dividend and their #1 customer is the US Government. Some also provide some exposure to Space exploration. As always, do your own due diligence.

Hateyou said:

Thats why I won’t ever get into the shorts and puts game. I’m too scared of fucking up. There’s going to be a lot of Robin hood suicides when the market corrects down here shortly.

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"Dobatse was buying and selling stocks on Robinhood. He funded his account with $15,000 in credit card advances - even took out two $30,000 home equity loans to trade the most speculative stocks and options".

We can stop right here. To blame this on anyone other than the guy funding his account with credit card advances is silly. This same breed was taking out helocs and buying bitcoin at 20k. In poker we call this guy dead money.

The only real issue I have is Robinhood etc giving these guys naked options access is beyond the pale. I have 3 accounts with Fidelity, with a decent size in them, a solid trading history, 800+ credit score, and I dont have naked options access. All my options are either covered via stock I own or with cash in my account. No margin.

Edit: posted this before I read the other replies. Sorry to duplicate the story quote.

Hateyou said:

That’s one of those hogs getting slaughtered I hear about. Fucking idiot. He should have paid off the $75k loans he had taken out at some point in his run up to $1 million. I’m not blaming him for continuing to stay in the market and keep going but putting yourself in the hole that deep is retarded when you were up 12x what your debt was.

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This is exactly what trailing stop-loss orders are for and why I preach them here. You are up 500k, the market turns and as soon as you drop 10, 15, 20% etc (whatever you choose) it automatically triggers and sells protecting your gains.

This is the first time I have ever logged into this site on a PC. Quite the difference from my phone. Anyway...

I have been having some private convos with people about ETFs and put some stuff together to post. First some good research websites for ETFs.


Second - The two major differences between a mutual fund and an ETF are a> the net fees and b> Mutuals only trade once a day at the close of the markets while an ETF trades at any time like a stock. Unless you are locked into only trading mutuals due to the selection being decided for you (like a 401k), you are "almost" always going to be paying more for a mutual vs a similar index ETF in terms of fees. It can be significant. Example...

Blackrock iShares IVV (S&P 500 index ETF) net fee is 0.03%
Blackrock iShares BSPAX (S&P 500 index mutual fund) net fee is 0.35%

So $3 per $10,00 invested vs $35 per $10,000 invested. Now forget about dollars for a minute. The content of these funds should be close to identical which means the returns should be identical. So if returns are identical and the fees are different, then mathematically the mutual fund should "always" have inferior returns. if the S&P 500 returns 20% in a year, IVV all things being equal the IVV will return 19.97% and BSPAX will return 19.65%. It may not seem like much but compounded over 20, 30 or 40 years it is a real number. Also consider that many mutual funds charge fees close to or exceeding 1.0%

Next, my advice is to stay away from narrowly focused ETFs. The big indexes are where you want to be if forming a backbone for your portfolio over the long term. You can have all the bases covered with one or two ETFs. I suggest either one of the following...

S&P 500 index ETF (the top 500 largest companies by market cap). Example SPY, IVV, VOO
**an alternative to an S&P 500 index is a total market index. Instead of the top 500 largest companies it includes anywhere from 2000 - 5000 companies (the total market) which includes the mid, small and micro cap companies. Example ITOT, IWV, VTI

Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (there are only a couple that index the DJIA, but if you prefer following the DOW instead of the S&P 500 you can do so. Example DIA

Nasdaq 100 Index ETF. The most popular is QQQ.

Either go with one of the above or a mix of either the S&P 500 (or total market) + the Nasdaq 100, or the DJIA + the Nasdaq 100. Mixing the S&P 500(or total market) and the DJIA is redundant. You can also choose to add into the mix a more focused ETF to give you overweight coverage to your broad main index (or two). For example if you prefer to be overweight tech, you can add some XLK (tech sector ETF) or growth companies (SPYG, the S&P 500 growth company index). This is optional. the key is making sure the bulk of you ETF position is in those broad main index funds.

Here is a chart showing the main indexes I spoke about and how they have done since black Monday (3/23) when the markets hit bottom. The differences are not insignificant. Dont let the fact that the DJIA and S&P 500 have lagged so much totally turn you off to them. This is only a 4-month window. They do tighten up when you expand the view out 5 or 10 years. And yes, the QQQ has outperformed the S&P 500 and DJIA by more than 20 percentage points since the bottom.

I hope this helps.

Hateyou said:

I’m really sad I didn’t pick up DOCU when Blazin brought it up, holy hell thats a great stock.

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One most learn to YOLO in this thread sometimes. I bought 75 shares of it at $85something solely because of that post.