Soonjek的个人主页 - 老虎社区

Soonjek

Soonjek

暂无个人介绍

IP属地：未知

21关注

3粉丝

0主题

0勋章

2021-02-20

[呆住]

Goldman Sachs is joining the robo-investing party — should you?

2021-02-10

👍🏻

How Tesla Options Can Hedge Against A Market Meltdown

2021-02-09

👍🏻

These 12 lessons from the GameStop and AMC frenzy can help you make money trading stocks (or at least lose less)

2021-02-09

👍🏻

The 30-Year Treasury Hit 2%. When Will Yields Start Hurting the Stock Market?

去老虎APP查看更多动态

{"i18n":{"language":"zh_CN"},"userPageInfo":{"id":"3566559073052068","uuid":"3566559073052068","gmtCreate":1603465050177,"gmtModify":1613013075482,"name":"Soonjek","pinyin":"soonjek","introduction":"","introductionEn":"","signature":"","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e4a5e7d6a23a677ca718beaebea02a61","hat":null,"hatId":null,"hatName":null,"vip":1,"status":2,"fanSize":3,"headSize":21,"tweetSize":4,"questionSize":0,"limitLevel":999,"accountStatus":4,"level":{"id":0,"name":"","nameTw":"","represent":"","factor":"","iconColor":"","bgColor":""},"themeCounts":0,"badgeCounts":0,"badges":[],"moderator":false,"superModerator":false,"manageSymbols":null,"badgeLevel":null,"boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"favoriteSize":0,"symbols":null,"coverImage":null,"realNameVerified":null,"userBadges":[{"badgeId":"e50ce593bb40487ebfb542ca54f6a561-1","templateUuid":"e50ce593bb40487ebfb542ca54f6a561","name":"出道虎友","description":"加入老虎社区500天","bigImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0e4d0ca1da0456dc7894c946d44bf9ab","smallImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0f2f65e8ce4cfaae8db2bea9b127f58b","grayImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/c5948a31b6edf154422335b265235809","redirectLinkEnabled":0,"redirectLink":null,"hasAllocated":1,"isWearing":0,"stamp":null,"stampPosition":0,"hasStamp":0,"allocationCount":1,"allocatedDate":"2022.03.08","exceedPercentage":null,"individualDisplayEnabled":0,"backgroundColor":null,"fontColor":null,"individualDisplaySort":0,"categoryType":1001},{"badgeId":"976c19eed35f4cd78f17501c2e99ef37-1","templateUuid":"976c19eed35f4cd78f17501c2e99ef37","name":"博闻投资者","description":"累计交易超过10只正股","bigImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e74cc24115c4fbae6154ec1b1041bf47","smallImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/d48265cbfd97c57f9048db29f22227b0","grayImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/76c6d6898b073c77e1c537ebe9ac1c57","redirectLinkEnabled":0,"redirectLink":null,"hasAllocated":1,"isWearing":0,"stamp":null,"stampPosition":0,"hasStamp":0,"allocationCount":1,"allocatedDate":"2021.12.21","exceedPercentage":null,"individualDisplayEnabled":0,"backgroundColor":null,"fontColor":null,"individualDisplaySort":0,"categoryType":1102},{"badgeId":"518b5610c3e8410da5cfad115e4b0f5a-1","templateUuid":"518b5610c3e8410da5cfad115e4b0f5a","name":"实盘交易者","description":"完成一笔实盘交易","bigImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/2e08a1cc2087a1de93402c2c290fa65b","smallImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/4504a6397ce1137932d56e5f4ce27166","grayImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/4b22c79415b4cd6e3d8ebc4a0fa32604","redirectLinkEnabled":0,"redirectLink":null,"hasAllocated":1,"isWearing":0,"stamp":null,"stampPosition":0,"hasStamp":0,"allocationCount":1,"allocatedDate":"2021.12.21","exceedPercentage":null,"individualDisplayEnabled":0,"backgroundColor":null,"fontColor":null,"individualDisplaySort":0,"categoryType":1100},{"badgeId":"35ec162348d5460f88c959321e554969-1","templateUuid":"35ec162348d5460f88c959321e554969","name":"精英交易员","description":"证券或期货账户累计交易次数达到30次","bigImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ab0f87127c854ce3191a752d57b46edc","smallImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/c9835ce48b8c8743566d344ac7a7ba8c","grayImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/76754b53ce7a90019f132c1d2fbc698f","redirectLinkEnabled":0,"redirectLink":null,"hasAllocated":1,"isWearing":0,"stamp":null,"stampPosition":0,"hasStamp":0,"allocationCount":1,"allocatedDate":"2021.12.21","exceedPercentage":"60.41%","individualDisplayEnabled":0,"backgroundColor":null,"fontColor":null,"individualDisplaySort":0,"categoryType":1100}],"userBadgeCount":4,"currentWearingBadge":null,"individualDisplayBadges":null,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"location":"未知","starInvestorFollowerNum":0,"starInvestorFlag":false,"starInvestorOrderShareNum":0,"subscribeStarInvestorNum":0,"ror":null,"winRationPercentage":null,"showRor":false,"investmentPhilosophy":null,"starInvestorSubscribeFlag":false},"baikeInfo":{},"tab":"post","tweets":[{"id":387520532,"gmtCreate":1613756815226,"gmtModify":1634552328197,"author":{"id":"3566559073052068","authorId":"3566559073052068","name":"Soonjek","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e4a5e7d6a23a677ca718beaebea02a61","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3566559073052068","authorIdStr":"3566559073052068"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"[呆住]&nbsp;","listText":"[呆住]&nbsp;","text":"[呆住]","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/387520532","repostId":"1161529893","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1161529893","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1613733842,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1161529893?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-02-19 19:24","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Goldman Sachs is joining the robo-investing party — should you?","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1161529893","media":"Marketwatch","summary":"‘Much like in Vegas, the house generally wins,” said Vance Barse, a San Diego, California-based financial advisor who runs a company called Your Dedicated Fiduciary.Robo investing has become increasingly ubiquitous on practically every brokerage platform. Until Tuesday, Goldman Sachs GS, -0.91% restricted its robo-advisory service, Marcus, to people who had at least $10 million to invest.Now anyone with at least $1,000 to invest in can access the same trading algorithms that have been used by so","content":"<blockquote>\n ‘Much like in Vegas, the house generally wins,” said Vance Barse, a San Diego, California-based financial advisor who runs a company called Your Dedicated Fiduciary.\n</blockquote>\n<p>Robo investing has become increasingly ubiquitous on practically every brokerage platform. Until Tuesday, Goldman Sachs GS, -0.91% restricted its robo-advisory service, Marcus, to people who had at least $10 million to invest.</p>\n<p>Now anyone with at least $1,000 to invest in can access the same trading algorithms that have been used by some of Goldman Sachs’ wealthiest clients for a 0.35% annual advisory fee. But investing experts say there are more costs to consider before jumping on the robo-investing train.</p>\n<p>“Much like in Vegas, the house generally wins,” said Vance Barse, a San Diego, California-based financial advisor who runs a company called Your Dedicated Fiduciary.</p>\n<p>Although the 35 basis-point price tag is a “loss leader” to Goldman Sachs, he said companies typically make such offers in order to attract clients to cross-sell them banking products.</p>\n<p>“People forget that banks are ultimately in the business of making money,” he said.</p>\n<p>Goldman Sachs declined to comment.</p>\n<p>The company is among other major financial-services firms offering digital advisers, including Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab SCHW, +1.03% and startups such as Betterment and Wealthfront.</p>\n<p>Fees for robo advisers can start at around 0.25%, and increase to 1% and above for traditional brokers. A survey of nearly 1,000 financial planners by Inside Information, a trade publication, found that the bigger the portfolio, the lower the percentage clients paid in fees.</p>\n<p>The median annual charge hovered at around 1% for portfolios of $1 million or less, and 0.5% for portfolios worth $5 million to $10 million.</p>\n<p>Robo advisers like those on offer from Goldman Sachs and Betterment differ from robo platforms like Robinhood. The former suggest portfolios focused on exchange-traded funds, while Robinhood allows users to invest in individual ETFs, stocks, options and even cryptocurrencies.</p>\n<p><b>Robo investing as a self-driving car</b></p>\n<p>Consumers have turned to robo-investing at unprecedented levels during the pandemic.</p>\n<p>The rate of new accounts opened jumped between 50% and 300% during the first quarter of 2020 compared to the fourth quarter of last year, according to a May report published by research and advisory firm Aite Group.</p>\n<p>So what is rob-investing? Think of it like a self-driving car.</p>\n<p>You put in your destination, buckle up in the backseat and your driver (robo adviser) will get there. You, the passenger, can’t easily slam the breaks if you fear your driver is leading you in the wrong direction. Nor can you put your foot on the gas pedal if you’re in a rush and want to get to your destination faster.</p>\n<p>Robo-investing platforms use advanced-trading algorithm software to design investment portfolios based on factors such as an individual’s appetite for risk-taking and desired short-term and long-term returns.</p>\n<p>There are over 200 platforms that provide these services charging typically no more than a 0.5% annual advisory fee, compared to the 1% annual fee human investment advisors charge.</p>\n<p>And rather than investing entirely on your own, which can become a second job and lead to emotional investment decisions, robo advisers handle buying and selling assets.</p>\n<p>Cynthia Loh, Schwab vice president of Digital Advice and Innovation, disagrees, and argues that robo investing doesn’t mean giving technology control of your money. Schwab, she said, has a team of investment experts who oversee investment strategy and keep watch during periods of market volatility, although some services have more input from humans than others.</p>\n<p>As she recently wrote on MarketWatch: “One common misconception about automated investing is that choosing a robo adviser essentially means handing control of your money over to robots. The truth is that robo solutions have a combination of automated and human components running things behind the scenes.”</p>\n<p><b>Robos appeal to inexperienced investors</b></p>\n<p>Robo investing tends to appeal to inexperienced investors or ones who don’t have the time or energy to manage their own portfolios. These investors can take comfort in the “set it and forget it approach to investing and overtime let the markets do their thing,” Barse said.</p>\n<p>That makes it much easier to stomach market volatility knowing that you don’t necessarily have to make spur-of-the-moment decisions to buy or sell assets, said Tiffany Lam-Balfour, an investing and retirement specialist at NerdWallet.</p>\n<p>“When you’re investing, you don’t want to keep looking at the market and going ‘Oh I need to get out of this,’” she said. “You want to leave it to the professionals to get you through it because they know what your time horizon is, and they’ll adjust your portfolio automatically for you.”</p>\n<p>That said, “you can’t just expect your investments will only go up. Even if you had the world’s best human financial adviser you can’t expect that.”</p>\n<p>Others disagree, and say robo advisers appeal to older investors. “Planning for and paying yourself in retirement is complex. There are many options out there to help investors through it, and robo investing is one of them,” Loh said.</p>\n<p>“Many thoughtful, long-term investors have discovered that they want a more modern, streamlined, and inexpensive way to invest, and robo investing fits the bill. They are happy to let technology handle the mundane activities that are harder and more time-consuming for investors to do themselves,” she added.</p>\n<p><b>There is often no door to knock on</b></p>\n<p>Your robo adviser only knows what you tell it. The simplistic questionnaire you’re required to fill out will on most robo-investing platforms will collect information on your annual income, desired age to retire and the level of risk you’re willing to take on.</p>\n<p>It won’t however know if you just had a child and would like to begin saving for their education down the road or if you recently lost your job.</p>\n<p>“The question then becomes to whom does that person go to for advice and does that platform offer that and if so, to what level of complexity?” said Barse.</p>\n<p>Not all platforms give individualized investment advice and the hybrid models that do offer advice from a human tend to charge higher annual fees.</p>\n<p>Additionally, a robo adviser won’t necessarily “manage your money with tax efficiency at front of mind,” said Roger Ma, a certified financial planner at Lifelaidout, a New York City-based financial advisory group.</p>\n<p>For instance, one common way investors offset the taxes they pay on long-term investments is by selling assets that have accrued losses. Traditional advisers often specialize in constructing portfolios that lead to the most tax-efficient outcomes, said Ma, who is the author of “Work Your Money, Not Your Life”.</p>\n<p>But with robo investing, the trades that are made for you are the same ones that are being made for a slew of other investors who may fall under a different tax-bracket than you.</p>\n<p>On top of that, while robo investing may feel like a simplistic way to get into investing, especially for beginners it can “overcomplicate investing,” Ma said.</p>\n<p>“If you are just looking to dip your toe in and you want to feel like you’re invested in a diversified portfolio, I wouldn’t say definitely don’t do a robo adviser,” he said.</p>\n<p>Don’t rule out investing through a target-date fund that selects a single fund to invest in and adjusts the position over time based on their investment goals, he added.</p>\n<p>But not everyone can tell the difference between robo advice and advice from a human being. In 2015, MarketWatch asked four prominent robo advisers and four of the traditional, flesh-and-blood variety to construct portfolios for a hypothetical 35-year-old investor with $40,000 to invest.</p>\n<p>The results were, perhaps, surprising for critics of robo advisers. The robots’ suggestions were “not massively different” from what the human advisers proposed, said Michael Kitces, Pinnacle Advisory Group’s research director, after reviewing the results.</p>\n<p></p>","source":"lsy1603348471595","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Goldman Sachs is joining the robo-investing party — should you?</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nGoldman Sachs is joining the robo-investing party — should you?\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-02-19 19:24 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://www.marketwatch.com/story/goldman-sachs-is-joining-the-robo-investing-party-should-you-11613658128?mod=home-page><strong>Marketwatch</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>‘Much like in Vegas, the house generally wins,” said Vance Barse, a San Diego, California-based financial advisor who runs a company called Your Dedicated Fiduciary.\n\nRobo investing has become ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/goldman-sachs-is-joining-the-robo-investing-party-should-you-11613658128?mod=home-page\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{},"source_url":"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/goldman-sachs-is-joining-the-robo-investing-party-should-you-11613658128?mod=home-page","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1161529893","content_text":"‘Much like in Vegas, the house generally wins,” said Vance Barse, a San Diego, California-based financial advisor who runs a company called Your Dedicated Fiduciary.\n\nRobo investing has become increasingly ubiquitous on practically every brokerage platform. Until Tuesday, Goldman Sachs GS, -0.91% restricted its robo-advisory service, Marcus, to people who had at least $10 million to invest.\nNow anyone with at least $1,000 to invest in can access the same trading algorithms that have been used by some of Goldman Sachs’ wealthiest clients for a 0.35% annual advisory fee. But investing experts say there are more costs to consider before jumping on the robo-investing train.\n“Much like in Vegas, the house generally wins,” said Vance Barse, a San Diego, California-based financial advisor who runs a company called Your Dedicated Fiduciary.\nAlthough the 35 basis-point price tag is a “loss leader” to Goldman Sachs, he said companies typically make such offers in order to attract clients to cross-sell them banking products.\n“People forget that banks are ultimately in the business of making money,” he said.\nGoldman Sachs declined to comment.\nThe company is among other major financial-services firms offering digital advisers, including Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab SCHW, +1.03% and startups such as Betterment and Wealthfront.\nFees for robo advisers can start at around 0.25%, and increase to 1% and above for traditional brokers. A survey of nearly 1,000 financial planners by Inside Information, a trade publication, found that the bigger the portfolio, the lower the percentage clients paid in fees.\nThe median annual charge hovered at around 1% for portfolios of $1 million or less, and 0.5% for portfolios worth $5 million to $10 million.\nRobo advisers like those on offer from Goldman Sachs and Betterment differ from robo platforms like Robinhood. The former suggest portfolios focused on exchange-traded funds, while Robinhood allows users to invest in individual ETFs, stocks, options and even cryptocurrencies.\nRobo investing as a self-driving car\nConsumers have turned to robo-investing at unprecedented levels during the pandemic.\nThe rate of new accounts opened jumped between 50% and 300% during the first quarter of 2020 compared to the fourth quarter of last year, according to a May report published by research and advisory firm Aite Group.\nSo what is rob-investing? Think of it like a self-driving car.\nYou put in your destination, buckle up in the backseat and your driver (robo adviser) will get there. You, the passenger, can’t easily slam the breaks if you fear your driver is leading you in the wrong direction. Nor can you put your foot on the gas pedal if you’re in a rush and want to get to your destination faster.\nRobo-investing platforms use advanced-trading algorithm software to design investment portfolios based on factors such as an individual’s appetite for risk-taking and desired short-term and long-term returns.\nThere are over 200 platforms that provide these services charging typically no more than a 0.5% annual advisory fee, compared to the 1% annual fee human investment advisors charge.\nAnd rather than investing entirely on your own, which can become a second job and lead to emotional investment decisions, robo advisers handle buying and selling assets.\nCynthia Loh, Schwab vice president of Digital Advice and Innovation, disagrees, and argues that robo investing doesn’t mean giving technology control of your money. Schwab, she said, has a team of investment experts who oversee investment strategy and keep watch during periods of market volatility, although some services have more input from humans than others.\nAs she recently wrote on MarketWatch: “One common misconception about automated investing is that choosing a robo adviser essentially means handing control of your money over to robots. The truth is that robo solutions have a combination of automated and human components running things behind the scenes.”\nRobos appeal to inexperienced investors\nRobo investing tends to appeal to inexperienced investors or ones who don’t have the time or energy to manage their own portfolios. These investors can take comfort in the “set it and forget it approach to investing and overtime let the markets do their thing,” Barse said.\nThat makes it much easier to stomach market volatility knowing that you don’t necessarily have to make spur-of-the-moment decisions to buy or sell assets, said Tiffany Lam-Balfour, an investing and retirement specialist at NerdWallet.\n“When you’re investing, you don’t want to keep looking at the market and going ‘Oh I need to get out of this,’” she said. “You want to leave it to the professionals to get you through it because they know what your time horizon is, and they’ll adjust your portfolio automatically for you.”\nThat said, “you can’t just expect your investments will only go up. Even if you had the world’s best human financial adviser you can’t expect that.”\nOthers disagree, and say robo advisers appeal to older investors. “Planning for and paying yourself in retirement is complex. There are many options out there to help investors through it, and robo investing is one of them,” Loh said.\n“Many thoughtful, long-term investors have discovered that they want a more modern, streamlined, and inexpensive way to invest, and robo investing fits the bill. They are happy to let technology handle the mundane activities that are harder and more time-consuming for investors to do themselves,” she added.\nThere is often no door to knock on\nYour robo adviser only knows what you tell it. The simplistic questionnaire you’re required to fill out will on most robo-investing platforms will collect information on your annual income, desired age to retire and the level of risk you’re willing to take on.\nIt won’t however know if you just had a child and would like to begin saving for their education down the road or if you recently lost your job.\n“The question then becomes to whom does that person go to for advice and does that platform offer that and if so, to what level of complexity?” said Barse.\nNot all platforms give individualized investment advice and the hybrid models that do offer advice from a human tend to charge higher annual fees.\nAdditionally, a robo adviser won’t necessarily “manage your money with tax efficiency at front of mind,” said Roger Ma, a certified financial planner at Lifelaidout, a New York City-based financial advisory group.\nFor instance, one common way investors offset the taxes they pay on long-term investments is by selling assets that have accrued losses. Traditional advisers often specialize in constructing portfolios that lead to the most tax-efficient outcomes, said Ma, who is the author of “Work Your Money, Not Your Life”.\nBut with robo investing, the trades that are made for you are the same ones that are being made for a slew of other investors who may fall under a different tax-bracket than you.\nOn top of that, while robo investing may feel like a simplistic way to get into investing, especially for beginners it can “overcomplicate investing,” Ma said.\n“If you are just looking to dip your toe in and you want to feel like you’re invested in a diversified portfolio, I wouldn’t say definitely don’t do a robo adviser,” he said.\nDon’t rule out investing through a target-date fund that selects a single fund to invest in and adjusts the position over time based on their investment goals, he added.\nBut not everyone can tell the difference between robo advice and advice from a human being. In 2015, MarketWatch asked four prominent robo advisers and four of the traditional, flesh-and-blood variety to construct portfolios for a hypothetical 35-year-old investor with $40,000 to invest.\nThe results were, perhaps, surprising for critics of robo advisers. The robots’ suggestions were “not massively different” from what the human advisers proposed, said Michael Kitces, Pinnacle Advisory Group’s research director, after reviewing the results.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":645,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"CN","totalScore":0},{"id":381574944,"gmtCreate":1612972680588,"gmtModify":1703767869945,"author":{"id":"3566559073052068","authorId":"3566559073052068","name":"Soonjek","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e4a5e7d6a23a677ca718beaebea02a61","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3566559073052068","authorIdStr":"3566559073052068"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"👍🏻","listText":"👍🏻","text":"👍🏻","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/381574944","repostId":"1113849351","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1113849351","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1612948278,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1113849351?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-02-10 17:11","market":"us","language":"en","title":"How Tesla Options Can Hedge Against A Market Meltdown","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1113849351","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nTesla's trillion dollar valuation reflects the irrational exuberance sweeping through finan","content":"<p><b>Summary</b></p>\n<ul>\n <li>Tesla's trillion dollar valuation reflects the irrational exuberance sweeping through financial markets.</li>\n <li>The bulls argue Tesla is a \"tech company\", but objective reality says Tesla is a structurally unprofitable car company.</li>\n <li>Even assuming flawless execution from here, Tesla shares face over 90% downside.</li>\n <li>This extreme downside risk makes Tesla an excellent candidate for hedging against today's mania.</li>\n <li>I detail an options trade on Tesla designed to hedge against a broader bear market.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>If you had any doubts before, thememe stock frenzyof the last few weeks should make one thing abundantly clear...</p>\n<p>Yes, it's a mania.</p>\n<p>In late December, I wrote about thespeculative excessesbubbling up in the financial markets. Things have only accelerated so far this year, with coordinated short squeezes sending the stocks of distressed businesses like GameStop (GME) and AMC (AMC) into the stratosphere,new record highs in margin debt,or my personal favorite - the relentless buying spree in speculative options among retail traders:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3ed1ad33fcdca94e8598947008f34056\" tg-width=\"785\" tg-height=\"586\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Of course, no one knows when this ends... but we all know how it ends. The recent U-turn in meme stocks thatwiped out $167 billion in a matter of daysis a preview for what awaits the broader financial markets. That's why it's never been more important to have a plan in place for hedging the downside. Some investors prefer cash or government bonds - both fine options. But for those willing to get a little more exotic, buying put options on overvalued stocks provides another alternative.</p>\n<p>First, we must identify a company with enough downside to make the bet worthwhile. And for my money, no better stock meets that criteria than electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA). From 2014 through mid-2019, Tesla shares traded in a range between $30 - $80 (split-adjusted). Then, starting in the fourth quarter of 2019, Tesla shares entered ludicrous mode - rallying 1,700% from $50 to a recent price of around $850.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/a9b909a9b8f4b39d30a319177076aeab\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"354\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>In today's article, I'll show that virtually nothing changed in Tesla's core business to justify this 17-fold increase in value since Q4 2019. I'll then make the case for why Tesla shares risk revisiting $50, even assuming an aggressive bull case in its future earnings trajectory.</p>\n<p>Given this 95% downside risk in Tesla's share price today, it makes for an excellent candidate to hedge a portfolio against the inevitable unwinding of today's mania. I'll detail a basic put option trade with more than 1,000% upside should this risk materialize going forward.</p>\n<p>Let's begin by first addressing the core thesis bulls use to justify Tesla's stratospheric valuation...</p>\n<p><b>Tesla, More than a Car Company?</b></p>\n<p>There's one simple reason why Tesla bulls need the stock narrative to reflect more just a car company: your average car company trades for less than 0.5x sales. Even Toyota, the world's most profitable mass market automaker, trades at just 0.7x sales. And then, there's Tesla...</p>\n<p>Based on a fully diluted 1.2 billion share count, Tesla currently commands a $1 trillion valuation at $850 per share. This valuation reflects a more than 30x sales multiple, or more expensive that many of the most dominant, and most profitable tech companies on the planet. The bulls argue that this valuation is justified, because Tesla is, in fact, a tech company. Why? Here's one explanation fromCleanTechnica:</p>\n<blockquote>\n What Makes Tesla a Tech Company?Tesla is creating software, a lot of software. Software is at the essence of Tesla’s unique infotainment system, user experience, and autonomous-driving features. Tesla has implemented over-the-air updates for years, while other automakers are just about to try this.\n</blockquote>\n<p>Of course, no one will deny that Tesla vehicles contain a lot of cool software and other technology (just like every other modern-day automobile). There's just one problem: each piece of software Tesla sells has a car attached to it. Examining Tesla's financials reveals no standalone software segment. In fact, 94% of Tesla’s revenue last year came from automotive sales, leasing and service. That, dear readers, makes it a car company:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/a4d1d7eb8b41fba5e2fbeb67c89ec10f\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"443\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>I'll save the analysis of Tesla's energy business for future articles, except to note that this battery/solar segment suffers even lower margins than Tesla's unprofitable car business. Back to the original point...</p>\n<p>The narrative of Tesla as a \"tech company\" is exactly that - an empty narrative, divorced from financial reality. Tesla is only a tech company in the same way that Toyota or Volkswagen are - they all produce vehicles that contain software and other advanced \"technology\". But this alone doesn’t magically transform the economics of manufacturing automobiles.</p>\n<p>And the truth is, the car business suffers from pretty dismal economics, especially compared with the software business. Perhaps more than any other single factor, it's this basic financial reality that explains why Tesla shares face 95% downside risk, even assuming perfect execution going forward. So let's explore this point in greater detail, by comparing the economics of making cars versus making software...</p>\n<p><b>Software vs Autos: A Tale of Two Industries</b></p>\n<p>The reason why dominant software companies trade at rich valuation multiples of 10-20x sales has nothing to do with so-called \"disruption\" or even innovation. Instead, it's all about the basic business fundamentals of margins, capital requirements and competitive dynamics. Let's consider the case of Microsoft, focusing on the simplified example of its Office software product (ignoring the growing cloud business and other segments for simplicity).</p>\n<p>For starters, a software product like Microsoft Office enjoys tremendous margins. After the upfront investment of developing the software code, the incremental costs of selling each additional unit are miniscule - especially in today's world of downloadable software. Compare this with producing an automobile, which comes with massive variable costs - including both input materials and labor. This critical difference in unit economics explains why software companies like Microsoft earn 30 - 40% net margins versus carmakers like Tesla that suffer from razor thin, single-digit profitability:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/4c083675b47070a5e8bd130702a838e4\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"394\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Next, let's talk competition. Given the fat margins in a product like Microsoft Office, why has no competitor emerged to steal away any meaningful market share in the last 25 years? After all, we're not exactly talking rocket science to replicate the basic Office software code. The answer is all about network effects and switching costs. The world already runs on Office products, like Excel. So if you want to share your spreadsheets with the outside world, for example, you have no choice but to use Excel. Meanwhile, who wants the hassle of learning a new spreadsheet interface, and for what upside? To save maybe $20 per year?</p>\n<p>In short, Microsoft's profitability has nothing to do with narratives like innovation or disruption. It's all about excellent unit economics combined with a virtually impenetrable moat insulating the business against competitors. This moat means Microsoft doesn't need to constantly invest money reinventing the wheel - it merely needs to maintain the status quo functionality of the Office product. So instead of diverting a big chunk of profits back into new product development, those profits instead flow back to shareholders.</p>\n<p>The mass market car business operates on the exact opposite dynamics, where consumers constantly shop around for the latest vehicle features and designs, delivered at the lowest cost. There are no meaningful competitive moats that prevent consumers from switching brands, or from competitors replicating the latest vehicle designs and technology. That's why, instead of the monopoly-like powers enjoyed by the big tech companies, the car business trends towards commoditization over time. We see evidence of this in the brutally low margins, and in the fact that no single car company owns more than 15% of global market share.</p>\n<p>Many of the bulls mistakenly view Tesla's \"first mover\" status in the EV market as some kind of fundamental competitive advantage, but that ignores the basic competitive dynamics of the car business. First mover advantage doesn't really exist in the commoditized world of auto manufacturing, and Tesla is already providing a perfect case study for those who car to look. In the world's largest EV market - Europe - Tesla's market share has collapsed from undisputed leader as recently as 2019 to third place today, thanks to a flood of new EV competition from legacy auto makers:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5c2ce6fbcf99c716e30ea76507893618\" tg-width=\"435\" tg-height=\"535\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>As the world's largest and most competitive EV market, Europe is a bellwether for the future competitive pressures Tesla will face in the U.S. and China. The success of the recently launchedFord Mustang Mach-Eshows that legacy automakers can and will produce compelling EVs on par with, or perhaps even better than Tesla's current offerings. The growing competition is showing up in another key metric:Tesla's relentless price cutsacross all vehicle models, including a$3,000 cut in the Model Y priceonly a few months after initial production.</p>\n<p>Clearly, Tesla does not enjoy any meaningful competitive moat, or else it wouldn't be surrendering market share and slashing prices across the board. That means Tesla will need to constantly invest huge sums of money just to keep its head above water earning razor thin margins, as it fights for market share in what is already becoming a highly commoditized EV industry.</p>\n<p>So to summarize...</p>\n<p><b>Tesla: It's a Car Company</b></p>\n<p>Despite the bullish narrative about the tremendous \"technology\" Tesla produces, the objective reality in the financial statements shows that Tesla is a car company which happens to produce software. It doesn't enjoy any of the economic benefits that a pure play software producer, like Microsoft enjoys - things like excellent unit economics and a monopoly-like competitive position.</p>\n<p>The reason companies like Microsoft command valuation premiums of 10x sales or more, is simply because of the high returns on invested capital the business generates. Conversely, even the most profitable car company on the planet - Toyota - trades at less than 1x sales. That's simply a reflection of the brutal economics of high operating costs and intense competitive pressures, which translate into fundamentally low returns on capital. Tesla is not immune from this basic economic reality. If you strip away the hype and just examine the numbers, Tesla looks exactly like your average car company:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/05782c8583b26edd51aeb769b32ced1d\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"408\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>But here's the thing - Tesla actually suffers far worse unit economics than your average car company. The chart above reflects the financials of a one-time outlier year of profitability. Before 2020, Tesla lost money in every year of its existence:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/07426fdf2d4f750a787924e8bc48775f\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"416\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\">Tesla's 2020 financial results led many bulls to believe the company had finally turned the corner towards sustained profitability. But here again, the objective reality in the financials tell a different story.</p>\n<p><b>Tesla Still Loses Money Making Cars</b></p>\n<p>The truth is, Tesla lost money making cars in 2020 - just like every other year in its existence. Tesla only managed to manufacture a one-time profit thanks to a bonanza in government-mandated wealth transfers from the very legacy automakers Tesla seeks to \"disrupt\". Let me explain...</p>\n<p>Governments around the globe have established regulations designed to move the auto industry away from the internal combustion engine (ICE) towards zero emission vehicles. These regulations establish a maximum emissions threshold associated with ICE vehicle sales. So companies that sell too many ICE vehicles incur fines if they exceed the emission threshold. Conversely, companies that produce zero emission vehicles - like Tesla - earn regulatory credits, which they can then sell to other manufacturers to offset the emission tallies from ICE vehicle sales.</p>\n<p>The key point here is that Tesla incurs virtually zero costs when selling these regulatory credits. This 100% pure profit margin revenue provides a major boost to Tesla's otherwise dismal financials. Last year, Tesla earned a whopping $1.6 billion in regulatory credits, up more than 150% from the $600 million earned in 2019. Now here's the thing - Tesla only grew its vehicle sales by less than 40% last year. So how do we explain the pace of emission credits massively outpacing its vehicle sales growth?</p>\n<p>One potential answer lies in Tesla's mushrooming accounts receivables balance, which grew by about half a billion dollars last year. In Tesla's10Q filing from Q3 2020, the company describes a large transaction involving regulatory credit sales that contributed to its account receivables balance:</p>\n<blockquote>\n As of September 30, 2020, one entity represented 10% or more of our total accounts receivable balance, which was related to sales of regulatory credits. As of December 31, 2019, no entity represented 10% of our total accounts receivable balance.\n</blockquote>\n<p>Unfortunately, Tesla provides few additional details explaining what's going on with the accounts receivable balance - a subjectDavid Einhorn has publicly questioned Elon Musk about. But if I were to speculate, it looks like Tesla pulled forward a substantial sum of regulatory credit sales associated with future vehicle sales into the 2020 fiscal year, allowing it to print a one-time profit of $721 million. But if we take away these credit sales (including backing out the estimated taxes paid), Tesla's \"profit\" in 2020 transforms into a $568 million loss:</p>\n<p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ac66da8f996eb6f7089a2c90e7dda12c\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"428\"><span>(Source: Author, using Tesla filings)</span></p>\n<p>In other words, Tesla's core manufacturing business remains structurally unprofitable. 2020 was not a turning point, but merely an outlier driven by a $1.6 billion bonanza in regulatory emission credits. And the language in its SEC filings indicate that at least some portion of these regulatory credit sales were pulled forward from future years and booked into the accounts receivable balance.</p>\n<p>In any event, the bottom line is clear: instead of disrupting the legacy automakers, in my view Tesla essentially relies on wealth transfers from its profitable competitors to offset the endless red ink flowing from its own manufacturing operations. Of course, the bulls might argue that it doesn't where the money comes from - profit is profit, right? But here's the problem - Tesla's corporate welfare gravy train will soon hit a brick wall, with nearly every major automaker introducingdozens of new EV modelsthis year and next. And that's just the start. By 2025, hundreds of billions of dollars will have been deployed into new EV models by legacy automakers:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/05cf0587c2addcd549edab52ba39f82f\" tg-width=\"594\" tg-height=\"386\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>The coming tsunami of new EVs offerings means regulatory emission credit supply will soar and demand will plunge, and thus killing their value. Within a few short years, Tesla will no longer be able to paper over the losses from its core business with regulatory credit sales. That's not just my opinion - Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn confirmed the temporary nature of Tesla's credit sales during the company'sQ2 2020 earnings call:</p>\n<blockquote>\n ...we don't manage the business with the assumption that regulatory credits will contribute in a significant way to the future... eventually, the stream of regulatory credits will reduce.\n</blockquote>\n<p>That means no, not all profit is created equal. An ongoing profit stream from a viable business deserves a valuation multiple. Conversely, a temporary profit stream should be looked through when assessing the long-term value of a business. Since Tesla investors can not count on regulatory credits continuing beyond the next few years, it only makes sense to strip out their impact from the income statement. When you do that, you see that virtually nothing to justify Tesla's manic share price rally in 2020 - the core manufacturing business remains structurally unprofitable:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/35bc24f3b93c083529b291bfa499d17c\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"404\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Meanwhile, it's not just the rearview financials in the core business that remain unchanged.Jim Chanos recently notedhow the forward analyst estimates for Tesla's 2022 - 2023 earnings are the same as in mid-2019, back when shares traded for $50:</p>\n<blockquote>\n That kind of tells you a little bit about what's happened in the marketplace in that valuations have just gone parabolic for basically a company that's still, in the eyes of analysts, earning at or below where they thought it would be earning two years ago. That's kind of incredible.\n</blockquote>\n<p>So if neither the trailing business fundamentals nor the forward earnings outlook changed, that leaves only one variable left to explain what sent Tesla shares from $50 to $850: investor psychology. More specifically, manic psychology, fueling a mad scramble for unprofitable companies across the board:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/92ddc266e80382c1f5544c7bf8e51828\" tg-width=\"1280\" tg-height=\"954\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Thus, Tesla's parabolic price appreciation is merely one of the countless cases of speculative excess playing out across the financial markets. Make no mistake, the coming unwind of this excess is a question of when, not if. When that day comes, the fallout will likely spread throughout financial markets, taking down the innocent bystanders as collateral damage. That's why I'm betting against Tesla as a hedge against this coming unwind. And the reason Tesla makes such a compelling candidate for a price re-rating is, well... how many other trillion dollar companies do you know of that don't make money in their core business?</p>\n<p>Take away the regulatory profit stream - which will start happening this year - and there's no reason why Tesla should trade for anything above the net cash on the balance sheet - which currently sits at around $7 billion, or about $6 per share on a fully diluted basis. Meanwhile, what's the upside case in the scenario where Tesla transforms itself into a profitable car company? Let's briefly consider that scenario...</p>\n<p>Tesla Shares Face 90% Downside, Even with Perfect Execution</p>\n<p>Let's suspend disbelief for a moment and give Tesla full credit for flawless execution on both top line growth and bottom line profitability going forward. For the top line growth assumption, let's simply use the forecast fromTesla's most recent earnings release, where the company guided for 50% annual growth rate in vehicle deliveries going forward. Before moving on, I'll simply note that this projection seems wildly optimistic given Tesla's depleted product pipeline. Both the Tesla Semi and Roadster have missed their original production deadlines by over a year, with no clear timeline yet on when production will begin. Meanwhile, the CyberTruck - Tesla's only mass market vehicle in the pipeline -also appears delayeduntil sometime between 2022 - 2023.</p>\n<p>But even if we give Tesla full credit for this growth, one thing is clear - it will require massive capital investment. That means significant future equity issuance. Meanwhile, Tesla pays a significant portion of its employee salary expense via stock compensation, including Elon Musk's record shattering$56 billion stock bonus plan(saving the planet ain't cheap, apparently). The bottom line: equity dilution is a real issue for Tesla shareholders. Over the last five years, Tesla shareholders have suffered more than 50% dilution. Given the healthy cash pile currently on the balance sheet, let's conservatively assume the dilution rate slows to 5% annually going forward, starting from today's 1.2 billion fully diluted share count.</p>\n<p>Next, let's talk earnings. Remember, this is our aggressive bull case... so let's hold nothing back. We'll assume that Tesla transforms from a structurally unprofitable automaker into one of the most profitable car companies on the planet - matching the 6% net margins earned by Toyota, the mass market industry leader in profitability.</p>\n<p>Finally, let's give Tesla a best-in-class 25x earnings multiple. That's a more than 300% valuation premium over the industry average of roughly 8x earnings, and more than twice the earnings multiple on Toyota. Putting it all together, the table below shows the key assumptions and annual price targets out to 2025:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/381ad84108e848b2bfe8fc2001b57800\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"158\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>In other words...</p>\n<p><i><b>Tesla shares face more than 90% downside risk through 2022, even in the aggressive bull case scenario.</b></i></p>\n<p>In future articles, I'll dive deeper into the weeds to show why there's very little chance of Tesla achieving anything close to the targets outlined above. For now, the key takeaway is that even these fantasy fundamentals barely justify a $50 price target.</p>\n<p>Before wrapping up this analysis and moving on to the trade idea, let me address the final key talking point bulls use to justify Tesla's trillion dollar valuation...</p>\n<p>What About the Robotaxis?</p>\n<p>Starting in late 2016,Elon Musk has promisedthe imminent release of Level 5 full self driving capability in all Tesla vehicles. The promise all along has been that, every Tesla rolling off the assembly line contained the necessary hardware for full self driving, and it was only a matter of developing the software to achieve Level 5 autonomy.</p>\n<p>As a brief bit of background, Level 5 is the highest of6 SAE-defined levels of vehicle autonomy(ranging from 0 to 5). A level 5 vehicle can fully navigate through all environments with zero human supervision. Over the last several years, Musk has made a series of autonomy promises to both consumers and investors which have so far failed to materialize. This includes a2019 capital raise, during which Musk promised a future \"robotaxi\" network that would include a million autonomous Tesla's on the road by 2020. Musk has even claimed that Tesla owners could lend their vehicles out to this future robotaxi network andearn as much as $30,000 per year.</p>\n<p>Those were the promises, but here's the reality... more than four years after making the original promise, Tesla is still stuck at Level 2 autonomy. As described in the graphic below, Level 2 autonomy is nothing more than a basic driver assistance feature, which many other automakers currently offer:</p>\n<p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f7a572a2cdf3f9b0161fb7fef5abce9f\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"415\"><span>Source (notations by author)</span></p>\n<p>Despite the endless string of autonomy promises that have gone unfulfilled for more than four years, Musk remains undeterred in continuing to make aggressive projections to investors. On the company's latest earnings, Musk talked up a forecast of $50 billion in future earnings from the non-existent robotaxi network,as CNBC reports:</p>\n<blockquote>\n On the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the valuation makes sense if you assume that billions of dollars worth of cars become robotaxis.He said $50 billion in car sales could produce another $50 billion in “incremental profit” with software margins.\n</blockquote>\n<p>In other words - ignore the broken autonomy promises over the last four years, and just assume this non-existent robotaxi network will become one of the world's most profitable businesses in the future. I'll save the full autonomy analysis for the future, except to say - if you buy into this projection, then sure, a trillion dollar valuation for Tesla stock can make sense. I'll happily take the other side of that bet.</p>\n<p>And without a miracle windfall from robotaxis, there's nothing to stop Mr. Market from repricing Tesla as the unprofitable automaker that it is when today's mania unravels. Which brings us to the final point of this article - the Tesla options trade I'm using to hedge against the unraveling of speculative excess in today's market.</p>\n<p><b>A Tesla Hedging Trade with Over 10x Upside</b></p>\n<p>The full discussion of put option mechanics goes beyond the scope of today's article, but for a high level overview, think of put options as the stock market's version of an insurance policy. Just like your monthly car insurance premiums, most put options expire worthless... but during a crash, they can pay off in a big way.</p>\n<p>Put options achieve this pay off structure by providing short exposure to 100 shares of an underlying stock at the option strike price, up until the expiration date. You pay a premium for the privilege of gaining this short exposure, in the form of the upfront price of the option contract. The reason most options expire worthless is because the stock price must move far enough below the strike price to offset the cost of the option, within a limited time frame (i.e. before the expiration date).</p>\n<p>And that brings us to the two key elements of selecting a put option: a target price and a time frame. I just explained the fundamental case for a downside target of $50 in Tesla shares. And from a technical perspective, Tesla based at around $50 in the fourth quarter of 2019 before launching into a parabolic melt-up. The history of parabolic advances says that, when they end, the stock price often revisits the launch pad - which would bring Tesla back to around $50. Meanwhile, in order to give this trade plenty of time, I'm looking out to January 2022 as a rough time frame.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3ca705542b208fa6c8afca0795f80259\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"354\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>So this time frame gives a straight forward decision on the option expiration date of January 21, 2022. Meanwhile, in order to give the position plenty of room to be wrong and still pay off, I'll select a strike price of $300. There's a delicate balance when selecting strike prices - a lower strike would provide a higher return, but also come with a lower probability of pay off. As I'll show below, selecting a $300 strike price still provides the chance of earning a decent return even if my $50 downside target proves too aggressive.</p>\n<p>But before considering the return potential, we have to know the price of the option. At the close of trading on Monday, the $300 strike Tesla put option expiring on January 21, 2022 traded for around $15.75, as shown below:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f18b6b326a4fadbe5a0dae10c0355ac6\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"38\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Given the 100-share multiplier, the $15.75 quoted price translates into a total cost of $1,575 (plus fees/commissions). With this information, we can determine the return potential of the option for a range of scenarios. In the case where Tesla closes at or above $300 by the expiration date, the option expires worthless, resulting in a 100% loss. Alternatively, if Tesla closes below $300, then the option gains $100 in value for every $1 below the $300 strike price. The table below summarizes this range of scenarios:</p>\n<p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/33d0ec6d30e3088aad23b0bf644728ab\" tg-width=\"453\" tg-height=\"244\"><span>(Note: for simplicity, I assume the option is held until just before the expiration date, and then closed out without exercising the contract).</span></p>\n<p>So in the downside scenario outlined earlier, where Tesla trades down to $50 by the January 2022 expiration date, the option value grows from $1,650 to $25,000 - for a gain of about 1,400%. However, even if this downside target proves too aggressive, there's still scope to make a reasonable return. If shares only fall to, say $200, the option still returns roughly 500%.</p>\n<p>As you can see, it only take a small allocation within an overall portfolio to gain substantial hedging exposure with a trade like this. Of course, recency bias might make $50 or even $200 per share seem outlandish for a stock trading near $850 today. But let's not forget that Tesla was within“single digit weeks” of bankruptcyas recently as 2018. And in May of 2019, topTesla analyst Adam Jonasdescribed the company as “a distressed credit and restructuring story”, with a $10 downside price target (or $2 pre-split).</p>\n<p>The core business remains virtually unchanged from 2018 and 2019 - when terms like \"bankruptcy\" and \"restructuring\" were on the table. The only key difference is that Tesla now enjoys a positive net cash balance, which takes an immediate bankruptcy scenario off the table. But with less than $10 per share in net cash, this should provide little consolation for the bulls as a valuation floor.</p>\n<p>All that really needs to happen is for Tesla to continue on its current path of losing money in its core business, and catastrophic downside is in store for the stock. And that's not just my opinion - Elon Musk himself fully recognizes this risk, as he noted in a recentemail to employees:</p>\n<blockquote>\n Investors are giving us a lot of credit for future profitability but if, at any point, they conclude that’s not going to happen, our stock will immediately get crushed like a souffle under a sledgehammer!\n</blockquote>\n<p>Going forward, my money's on the sledgehammer, not the soufflé.</p>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>How Tesla Options Can Hedge Against A Market Meltdown</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nHow Tesla Options Can Hedge Against A Market Meltdown\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-02-10 17:11 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4404670-how-tesla-options-can-hedge-against-market-meltdown><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nTesla's trillion dollar valuation reflects the irrational exuberance sweeping through financial markets.\nThe bulls argue Tesla is a \"tech company\", but objective reality says Tesla is a ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4404670-how-tesla-options-can-hedge-against-market-meltdown\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"TSLA":"特斯拉"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4404670-how-tesla-options-can-hedge-against-market-meltdown","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"1113849351","content_text":"Summary\n\nTesla's trillion dollar valuation reflects the irrational exuberance sweeping through financial markets.\nThe bulls argue Tesla is a \"tech company\", but objective reality says Tesla is a structurally unprofitable car company.\nEven assuming flawless execution from here, Tesla shares face over 90% downside.\nThis extreme downside risk makes Tesla an excellent candidate for hedging against today's mania.\nI detail an options trade on Tesla designed to hedge against a broader bear market.\n\nIf you had any doubts before, thememe stock frenzyof the last few weeks should make one thing abundantly clear...\nYes, it's a mania.\nIn late December, I wrote about thespeculative excessesbubbling up in the financial markets. Things have only accelerated so far this year, with coordinated short squeezes sending the stocks of distressed businesses like GameStop (GME) and AMC (AMC) into the stratosphere,new record highs in margin debt,or my personal favorite - the relentless buying spree in speculative options among retail traders:\n\nOf course, no one knows when this ends... but we all know how it ends. The recent U-turn in meme stocks thatwiped out $167 billion in a matter of daysis a preview for what awaits the broader financial markets. That's why it's never been more important to have a plan in place for hedging the downside. Some investors prefer cash or government bonds - both fine options. But for those willing to get a little more exotic, buying put options on overvalued stocks provides another alternative.\nFirst, we must identify a company with enough downside to make the bet worthwhile. And for my money, no better stock meets that criteria than electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA). From 2014 through mid-2019, Tesla shares traded in a range between $30 - $80 (split-adjusted). Then, starting in the fourth quarter of 2019, Tesla shares entered ludicrous mode - rallying 1,700% from $50 to a recent price of around $850.\n\nIn today's article, I'll show that virtually nothing changed in Tesla's core business to justify this 17-fold increase in value since Q4 2019. I'll then make the case for why Tesla shares risk revisiting $50, even assuming an aggressive bull case in its future earnings trajectory.\nGiven this 95% downside risk in Tesla's share price today, it makes for an excellent candidate to hedge a portfolio against the inevitable unwinding of today's mania. I'll detail a basic put option trade with more than 1,000% upside should this risk materialize going forward.\nLet's begin by first addressing the core thesis bulls use to justify Tesla's stratospheric valuation...\nTesla, More than a Car Company?\nThere's one simple reason why Tesla bulls need the stock narrative to reflect more just a car company: your average car company trades for less than 0.5x sales. Even Toyota, the world's most profitable mass market automaker, trades at just 0.7x sales. And then, there's Tesla...\nBased on a fully diluted 1.2 billion share count, Tesla currently commands a $1 trillion valuation at $850 per share. This valuation reflects a more than 30x sales multiple, or more expensive that many of the most dominant, and most profitable tech companies on the planet. The bulls argue that this valuation is justified, because Tesla is, in fact, a tech company. Why? Here's one explanation fromCleanTechnica:\n\n What Makes Tesla a Tech Company?Tesla is creating software, a lot of software. Software is at the essence of Tesla’s unique infotainment system, user experience, and autonomous-driving features. Tesla has implemented over-the-air updates for years, while other automakers are just about to try this.\n\nOf course, no one will deny that Tesla vehicles contain a lot of cool software and other technology (just like every other modern-day automobile). There's just one problem: each piece of software Tesla sells has a car attached to it. Examining Tesla's financials reveals no standalone software segment. In fact, 94% of Tesla’s revenue last year came from automotive sales, leasing and service. That, dear readers, makes it a car company:\n\nI'll save the analysis of Tesla's energy business for future articles, except to note that this battery/solar segment suffers even lower margins than Tesla's unprofitable car business. Back to the original point...\nThe narrative of Tesla as a \"tech company\" is exactly that - an empty narrative, divorced from financial reality. Tesla is only a tech company in the same way that Toyota or Volkswagen are - they all produce vehicles that contain software and other advanced \"technology\". But this alone doesn’t magically transform the economics of manufacturing automobiles.\nAnd the truth is, the car business suffers from pretty dismal economics, especially compared with the software business. Perhaps more than any other single factor, it's this basic financial reality that explains why Tesla shares face 95% downside risk, even assuming perfect execution going forward. So let's explore this point in greater detail, by comparing the economics of making cars versus making software...\nSoftware vs Autos: A Tale of Two Industries\nThe reason why dominant software companies trade at rich valuation multiples of 10-20x sales has nothing to do with so-called \"disruption\" or even innovation. Instead, it's all about the basic business fundamentals of margins, capital requirements and competitive dynamics. Let's consider the case of Microsoft, focusing on the simplified example of its Office software product (ignoring the growing cloud business and other segments for simplicity).\nFor starters, a software product like Microsoft Office enjoys tremendous margins. After the upfront investment of developing the software code, the incremental costs of selling each additional unit are miniscule - especially in today's world of downloadable software. Compare this with producing an automobile, which comes with massive variable costs - including both input materials and labor. This critical difference in unit economics explains why software companies like Microsoft earn 30 - 40% net margins versus carmakers like Tesla that suffer from razor thin, single-digit profitability:\n\nNext, let's talk competition. Given the fat margins in a product like Microsoft Office, why has no competitor emerged to steal away any meaningful market share in the last 25 years? After all, we're not exactly talking rocket science to replicate the basic Office software code. The answer is all about network effects and switching costs. The world already runs on Office products, like Excel. So if you want to share your spreadsheets with the outside world, for example, you have no choice but to use Excel. Meanwhile, who wants the hassle of learning a new spreadsheet interface, and for what upside? To save maybe $20 per year?\nIn short, Microsoft's profitability has nothing to do with narratives like innovation or disruption. It's all about excellent unit economics combined with a virtually impenetrable moat insulating the business against competitors. This moat means Microsoft doesn't need to constantly invest money reinventing the wheel - it merely needs to maintain the status quo functionality of the Office product. So instead of diverting a big chunk of profits back into new product development, those profits instead flow back to shareholders.\nThe mass market car business operates on the exact opposite dynamics, where consumers constantly shop around for the latest vehicle features and designs, delivered at the lowest cost. There are no meaningful competitive moats that prevent consumers from switching brands, or from competitors replicating the latest vehicle designs and technology. That's why, instead of the monopoly-like powers enjoyed by the big tech companies, the car business trends towards commoditization over time. We see evidence of this in the brutally low margins, and in the fact that no single car company owns more than 15% of global market share.\nMany of the bulls mistakenly view Tesla's \"first mover\" status in the EV market as some kind of fundamental competitive advantage, but that ignores the basic competitive dynamics of the car business. First mover advantage doesn't really exist in the commoditized world of auto manufacturing, and Tesla is already providing a perfect case study for those who car to look. In the world's largest EV market - Europe - Tesla's market share has collapsed from undisputed leader as recently as 2019 to third place today, thanks to a flood of new EV competition from legacy auto makers:\n\nAs the world's largest and most competitive EV market, Europe is a bellwether for the future competitive pressures Tesla will face in the U.S. and China. The success of the recently launchedFord Mustang Mach-Eshows that legacy automakers can and will produce compelling EVs on par with, or perhaps even better than Tesla's current offerings. The growing competition is showing up in another key metric:Tesla's relentless price cutsacross all vehicle models, including a$3,000 cut in the Model Y priceonly a few months after initial production.\nClearly, Tesla does not enjoy any meaningful competitive moat, or else it wouldn't be surrendering market share and slashing prices across the board. That means Tesla will need to constantly invest huge sums of money just to keep its head above water earning razor thin margins, as it fights for market share in what is already becoming a highly commoditized EV industry.\nSo to summarize...\nTesla: It's a Car Company\nDespite the bullish narrative about the tremendous \"technology\" Tesla produces, the objective reality in the financial statements shows that Tesla is a car company which happens to produce software. It doesn't enjoy any of the economic benefits that a pure play software producer, like Microsoft enjoys - things like excellent unit economics and a monopoly-like competitive position.\nThe reason companies like Microsoft command valuation premiums of 10x sales or more, is simply because of the high returns on invested capital the business generates. Conversely, even the most profitable car company on the planet - Toyota - trades at less than 1x sales. That's simply a reflection of the brutal economics of high operating costs and intense competitive pressures, which translate into fundamentally low returns on capital. Tesla is not immune from this basic economic reality. If you strip away the hype and just examine the numbers, Tesla looks exactly like your average car company:\n\nBut here's the thing - Tesla actually suffers far worse unit economics than your average car company. The chart above reflects the financials of a one-time outlier year of profitability. Before 2020, Tesla lost money in every year of its existence:\nTesla's 2020 financial results led many bulls to believe the company had finally turned the corner towards sustained profitability. But here again, the objective reality in the financials tell a different story.\nTesla Still Loses Money Making Cars\nThe truth is, Tesla lost money making cars in 2020 - just like every other year in its existence. Tesla only managed to manufacture a one-time profit thanks to a bonanza in government-mandated wealth transfers from the very legacy automakers Tesla seeks to \"disrupt\". Let me explain...\nGovernments around the globe have established regulations designed to move the auto industry away from the internal combustion engine (ICE) towards zero emission vehicles. These regulations establish a maximum emissions threshold associated with ICE vehicle sales. So companies that sell too many ICE vehicles incur fines if they exceed the emission threshold. Conversely, companies that produce zero emission vehicles - like Tesla - earn regulatory credits, which they can then sell to other manufacturers to offset the emission tallies from ICE vehicle sales.\nThe key point here is that Tesla incurs virtually zero costs when selling these regulatory credits. This 100% pure profit margin revenue provides a major boost to Tesla's otherwise dismal financials. Last year, Tesla earned a whopping $1.6 billion in regulatory credits, up more than 150% from the $600 million earned in 2019. Now here's the thing - Tesla only grew its vehicle sales by less than 40% last year. So how do we explain the pace of emission credits massively outpacing its vehicle sales growth?\nOne potential answer lies in Tesla's mushrooming accounts receivables balance, which grew by about half a billion dollars last year. In Tesla's10Q filing from Q3 2020, the company describes a large transaction involving regulatory credit sales that contributed to its account receivables balance:\n\n As of September 30, 2020, one entity represented 10% or more of our total accounts receivable balance, which was related to sales of regulatory credits. As of December 31, 2019, no entity represented 10% of our total accounts receivable balance.\n\nUnfortunately, Tesla provides few additional details explaining what's going on with the accounts receivable balance - a subjectDavid Einhorn has publicly questioned Elon Musk about. But if I were to speculate, it looks like Tesla pulled forward a substantial sum of regulatory credit sales associated with future vehicle sales into the 2020 fiscal year, allowing it to print a one-time profit of $721 million. But if we take away these credit sales (including backing out the estimated taxes paid), Tesla's \"profit\" in 2020 transforms into a $568 million loss:\n(Source: Author, using Tesla filings)\nIn other words, Tesla's core manufacturing business remains structurally unprofitable. 2020 was not a turning point, but merely an outlier driven by a $1.6 billion bonanza in regulatory emission credits. And the language in its SEC filings indicate that at least some portion of these regulatory credit sales were pulled forward from future years and booked into the accounts receivable balance.\nIn any event, the bottom line is clear: instead of disrupting the legacy automakers, in my view Tesla essentially relies on wealth transfers from its profitable competitors to offset the endless red ink flowing from its own manufacturing operations. Of course, the bulls might argue that it doesn't where the money comes from - profit is profit, right? But here's the problem - Tesla's corporate welfare gravy train will soon hit a brick wall, with nearly every major automaker introducingdozens of new EV modelsthis year and next. And that's just the start. By 2025, hundreds of billions of dollars will have been deployed into new EV models by legacy automakers:\n\nThe coming tsunami of new EVs offerings means regulatory emission credit supply will soar and demand will plunge, and thus killing their value. Within a few short years, Tesla will no longer be able to paper over the losses from its core business with regulatory credit sales. That's not just my opinion - Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn confirmed the temporary nature of Tesla's credit sales during the company'sQ2 2020 earnings call:\n\n ...we don't manage the business with the assumption that regulatory credits will contribute in a significant way to the future... eventually, the stream of regulatory credits will reduce.\n\nThat means no, not all profit is created equal. An ongoing profit stream from a viable business deserves a valuation multiple. Conversely, a temporary profit stream should be looked through when assessing the long-term value of a business. Since Tesla investors can not count on regulatory credits continuing beyond the next few years, it only makes sense to strip out their impact from the income statement. When you do that, you see that virtually nothing to justify Tesla's manic share price rally in 2020 - the core manufacturing business remains structurally unprofitable:\n\nMeanwhile, it's not just the rearview financials in the core business that remain unchanged.Jim Chanos recently notedhow the forward analyst estimates for Tesla's 2022 - 2023 earnings are the same as in mid-2019, back when shares traded for $50:\n\n That kind of tells you a little bit about what's happened in the marketplace in that valuations have just gone parabolic for basically a company that's still, in the eyes of analysts, earning at or below where they thought it would be earning two years ago. That's kind of incredible.\n\nSo if neither the trailing business fundamentals nor the forward earnings outlook changed, that leaves only one variable left to explain what sent Tesla shares from $50 to $850: investor psychology. More specifically, manic psychology, fueling a mad scramble for unprofitable companies across the board:\n\nThus, Tesla's parabolic price appreciation is merely one of the countless cases of speculative excess playing out across the financial markets. Make no mistake, the coming unwind of this excess is a question of when, not if. When that day comes, the fallout will likely spread throughout financial markets, taking down the innocent bystanders as collateral damage. That's why I'm betting against Tesla as a hedge against this coming unwind. And the reason Tesla makes such a compelling candidate for a price re-rating is, well... how many other trillion dollar companies do you know of that don't make money in their core business?\nTake away the regulatory profit stream - which will start happening this year - and there's no reason why Tesla should trade for anything above the net cash on the balance sheet - which currently sits at around $7 billion, or about $6 per share on a fully diluted basis. Meanwhile, what's the upside case in the scenario where Tesla transforms itself into a profitable car company? Let's briefly consider that scenario...\nTesla Shares Face 90% Downside, Even with Perfect Execution\nLet's suspend disbelief for a moment and give Tesla full credit for flawless execution on both top line growth and bottom line profitability going forward. For the top line growth assumption, let's simply use the forecast fromTesla's most recent earnings release, where the company guided for 50% annual growth rate in vehicle deliveries going forward. Before moving on, I'll simply note that this projection seems wildly optimistic given Tesla's depleted product pipeline. Both the Tesla Semi and Roadster have missed their original production deadlines by over a year, with no clear timeline yet on when production will begin. Meanwhile, the CyberTruck - Tesla's only mass market vehicle in the pipeline -also appears delayeduntil sometime between 2022 - 2023.\nBut even if we give Tesla full credit for this growth, one thing is clear - it will require massive capital investment. That means significant future equity issuance. Meanwhile, Tesla pays a significant portion of its employee salary expense via stock compensation, including Elon Musk's record shattering$56 billion stock bonus plan(saving the planet ain't cheap, apparently). The bottom line: equity dilution is a real issue for Tesla shareholders. Over the last five years, Tesla shareholders have suffered more than 50% dilution. Given the healthy cash pile currently on the balance sheet, let's conservatively assume the dilution rate slows to 5% annually going forward, starting from today's 1.2 billion fully diluted share count.\nNext, let's talk earnings. Remember, this is our aggressive bull case... so let's hold nothing back. We'll assume that Tesla transforms from a structurally unprofitable automaker into one of the most profitable car companies on the planet - matching the 6% net margins earned by Toyota, the mass market industry leader in profitability.\nFinally, let's give Tesla a best-in-class 25x earnings multiple. That's a more than 300% valuation premium over the industry average of roughly 8x earnings, and more than twice the earnings multiple on Toyota. Putting it all together, the table below shows the key assumptions and annual price targets out to 2025:\n\nIn other words...\nTesla shares face more than 90% downside risk through 2022, even in the aggressive bull case scenario.\nIn future articles, I'll dive deeper into the weeds to show why there's very little chance of Tesla achieving anything close to the targets outlined above. For now, the key takeaway is that even these fantasy fundamentals barely justify a $50 price target.\nBefore wrapping up this analysis and moving on to the trade idea, let me address the final key talking point bulls use to justify Tesla's trillion dollar valuation...\nWhat About the Robotaxis?\nStarting in late 2016,Elon Musk has promisedthe imminent release of Level 5 full self driving capability in all Tesla vehicles. The promise all along has been that, every Tesla rolling off the assembly line contained the necessary hardware for full self driving, and it was only a matter of developing the software to achieve Level 5 autonomy.\nAs a brief bit of background, Level 5 is the highest of6 SAE-defined levels of vehicle autonomy(ranging from 0 to 5). A level 5 vehicle can fully navigate through all environments with zero human supervision. Over the last several years, Musk has made a series of autonomy promises to both consumers and investors which have so far failed to materialize. This includes a2019 capital raise, during which Musk promised a future \"robotaxi\" network that would include a million autonomous Tesla's on the road by 2020. Musk has even claimed that Tesla owners could lend their vehicles out to this future robotaxi network andearn as much as $30,000 per year.\nThose were the promises, but here's the reality... more than four years after making the original promise, Tesla is still stuck at Level 2 autonomy. As described in the graphic below, Level 2 autonomy is nothing more than a basic driver assistance feature, which many other automakers currently offer:\nSource (notations by author)\nDespite the endless string of autonomy promises that have gone unfulfilled for more than four years, Musk remains undeterred in continuing to make aggressive projections to investors. On the company's latest earnings, Musk talked up a forecast of $50 billion in future earnings from the non-existent robotaxi network,as CNBC reports:\n\n On the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the valuation makes sense if you assume that billions of dollars worth of cars become robotaxis.He said $50 billion in car sales could produce another $50 billion in “incremental profit” with software margins.\n\nIn other words - ignore the broken autonomy promises over the last four years, and just assume this non-existent robotaxi network will become one of the world's most profitable businesses in the future. I'll save the full autonomy analysis for the future, except to say - if you buy into this projection, then sure, a trillion dollar valuation for Tesla stock can make sense. I'll happily take the other side of that bet.\nAnd without a miracle windfall from robotaxis, there's nothing to stop Mr. Market from repricing Tesla as the unprofitable automaker that it is when today's mania unravels. Which brings us to the final point of this article - the Tesla options trade I'm using to hedge against the unraveling of speculative excess in today's market.\nA Tesla Hedging Trade with Over 10x Upside\nThe full discussion of put option mechanics goes beyond the scope of today's article, but for a high level overview, think of put options as the stock market's version of an insurance policy. Just like your monthly car insurance premiums, most put options expire worthless... but during a crash, they can pay off in a big way.\nPut options achieve this pay off structure by providing short exposure to 100 shares of an underlying stock at the option strike price, up until the expiration date. You pay a premium for the privilege of gaining this short exposure, in the form of the upfront price of the option contract. The reason most options expire worthless is because the stock price must move far enough below the strike price to offset the cost of the option, within a limited time frame (i.e. before the expiration date).\nAnd that brings us to the two key elements of selecting a put option: a target price and a time frame. I just explained the fundamental case for a downside target of $50 in Tesla shares. And from a technical perspective, Tesla based at around $50 in the fourth quarter of 2019 before launching into a parabolic melt-up. The history of parabolic advances says that, when they end, the stock price often revisits the launch pad - which would bring Tesla back to around $50. Meanwhile, in order to give this trade plenty of time, I'm looking out to January 2022 as a rough time frame.\n\nSo this time frame gives a straight forward decision on the option expiration date of January 21, 2022. Meanwhile, in order to give the position plenty of room to be wrong and still pay off, I'll select a strike price of $300. There's a delicate balance when selecting strike prices - a lower strike would provide a higher return, but also come with a lower probability of pay off. As I'll show below, selecting a $300 strike price still provides the chance of earning a decent return even if my $50 downside target proves too aggressive.\nBut before considering the return potential, we have to know the price of the option. At the close of trading on Monday, the $300 strike Tesla put option expiring on January 21, 2022 traded for around $15.75, as shown below:\n\nGiven the 100-share multiplier, the $15.75 quoted price translates into a total cost of $1,575 (plus fees/commissions). With this information, we can determine the return potential of the option for a range of scenarios. In the case where Tesla closes at or above $300 by the expiration date, the option expires worthless, resulting in a 100% loss. Alternatively, if Tesla closes below $300, then the option gains $100 in value for every $1 below the $300 strike price. The table below summarizes this range of scenarios:\n(Note: for simplicity, I assume the option is held until just before the expiration date, and then closed out without exercising the contract).\nSo in the downside scenario outlined earlier, where Tesla trades down to $50 by the January 2022 expiration date, the option value grows from $1,650 to $25,000 - for a gain of about 1,400%. However, even if this downside target proves too aggressive, there's still scope to make a reasonable return. If shares only fall to, say $200, the option still returns roughly 500%.\nAs you can see, it only take a small allocation within an overall portfolio to gain substantial hedging exposure with a trade like this. Of course, recency bias might make $50 or even $200 per share seem outlandish for a stock trading near $850 today. But let's not forget that Tesla was within“single digit weeks” of bankruptcyas recently as 2018. And in May of 2019, topTesla analyst Adam Jonasdescribed the company as “a distressed credit and restructuring story”, with a $10 downside price target (or $2 pre-split).\nThe core business remains virtually unchanged from 2018 and 2019 - when terms like \"bankruptcy\" and \"restructuring\" were on the table. The only key difference is that Tesla now enjoys a positive net cash balance, which takes an immediate bankruptcy scenario off the table. But with less than $10 per share in net cash, this should provide little consolation for the bulls as a valuation floor.\nAll that really needs to happen is for Tesla to continue on its current path of losing money in its core business, and catastrophic downside is in store for the stock. And that's not just my opinion - Elon Musk himself fully recognizes this risk, as he noted in a recentemail to employees:\n\n Investors are giving us a lot of credit for future profitability but if, at any point, they conclude that’s not going to happen, our stock will immediately get crushed like a souffle under a sledgehammer!\n\nGoing forward, my money's on the sledgehammer, not the soufflé.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":64,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":383870775,"gmtCreate":1612868491297,"gmtModify":1703766029309,"author":{"id":"3566559073052068","authorId":"3566559073052068","name":"Soonjek","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e4a5e7d6a23a677ca718beaebea02a61","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3566559073052068","authorIdStr":"3566559073052068"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"👍🏻","listText":"👍🏻","text":"👍🏻","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/383870775","repostId":"1149038980","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1149038980","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1612864337,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1149038980?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-02-09 17:52","market":"us","language":"en","title":"These 12 lessons from the GameStop and AMC frenzy can help you make money trading stocks (or at least lose less)","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1149038980","media":"MarketWatch","summary":"I can hear the cries from investors who racked up huge profits in GameStop or AMC Entertainment Hold","content":"<p>I can hear the cries from investors who racked up huge profits in GameStop&nbsp;or AMC Entertainment Holdings&nbsp;for a few hours or days, only to watch their gains evaporate.</p>\n<p>This coordinated bull raid was initiated by thousands of retail investors on Reddit, a popular website forum. We heard stories of fortunes made and lost. The ones we didn’t hear were from the folks in-between — small retail traders and investors who suffered thousands of dollars (or more) in losses.</p>\n<p>For those still holding GME or AMC, or for those eager to pounce on the next volatile meme stock, I offer the following advice based on personal experience and observations. These are the lessons you must know before you ever get involved in the stock or options market (or if you are holding a winning stock or option):</p>\n<p><b>1. Don’t sell stocks or options on products you don’t own:</b>The traders who lost the most money in GameStop and AMC were those who sold “naked” calls and puts (i.e. they sold options on stocks they didn’t own), or those who sold shares short (again, they sold shares on a stock they didn’t own). When using this extremely risky strategy, you can make a fortune if you’re right. If you’re wrong, the losses can be incalculable. In reality, some unwary traders lost tens of thousands of dollars last week on positions that cost a few thousand dollars. Once again, don’t sell anything naked unless you’re a professional, and in this case even the pros lost big on that risky bet.</p>\n<p><b>2. Sell at the “zero point.”</b>&nbsp; Here’s a rule I created: If you have huge gains that disappear and you are at the zero point (i.e. break-even), sell before you have real losses. It’s better to walk away at zero than with losses.</p>\n<p><b>3. Don’t be a stubborn seller:</b>Why is it so hard for most traders to walk away at the zero point? Stubbornness. Many traders made huge gains last week only to watch those profits disappear. They refused to sell because they hoped to make their money back. If holding options, that’s not going to happen. (If you bought at or near the high, your money is gone. If you hold a stock, plan to wait months or even years to recover. Stubborn stockholders often end up as “stuckholders.”</p>\n<p><b>4. Take the money and run:</b>When you are holding a stock or option position that brings outsized profits, either sell half of your holding or all of it — but get out. I call this “selling at extremes.” Sell something when the profits are beyond your wildest expectations. We all know the story of the gambler who wins big at the casino, but doesn’t leave the table until all his money is gone. Know when to walk away from the computer. Profits are fleeting, especially when volatility skyrockets.</p>\n<p><b>5.Trade small when making longshot trades (i.e. gambling):</b>GameStop and AMC were both big gambles, and for a time the trade worked if you were long. But if you bet wrong? I spoke to a few of these traders. One lost $8,000 on a single option contract. If he had traded his normal size (30 contracts), he told me, his losses would have been more than $240,000.</p>\n<p><b>6. Don’t expect this trading frenzy to keep happening:</b>It’s possible that a group of traders on the Reddit forum will band together for more bear- or bull raids. Except Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell are most likely creating new rules to prevent this from repeating. The Fed hates volatility and will do everything in its power to keep the markets calm. So once again, when you make big money on a trade, take the money as fast as you can — because you may not get the chance again.</p>\n<p><b>7. Stop bragging about how much money you made</b>: Many traders who won big immediately bragged on social media (and to their jealous friends) about how much money they made on this trade. Yet the euphoric feeling they had was temporary. It usually goes away after all the money is gone. The smart (and polite) traders took their gains and kept the win to themselves</p>\n<p><b>8. Use a time stop:</b>Time stops are not well-known or popular, but with fast-moving stocks (or when trading options), they are invaluable. In an extremely fast market, the traditional stop-limit order won’t get filled, as many of those meme-stock traders found out the hard way. Instead, after making a huge profit, set a day or time to sell. For example, you may sell the position by Friday no matter what (although selling at extremes is better — see Rule #4).</p>\n<p><b>9. Sell half or all of the position:</b>It’s never an easy decision to know when to sell. If you sell too early, it’s annoying to watch the stock go higher. Sell too late and you lose money. Selling half of your holding is a reasonable alternative, but you must be prepared to sell the other half if the position goes against you.</p>\n<p><b>10. Don’t seek revenge when you lose money on a stock:</b>It’s common for traders to seek revenge on a stock they lost money on. Do not fall for this emotional trap. If you lost money on a stock, let it go and move on.</p>\n<p><b>11. Trade small after you made or lost big:</b>If you’re feeling emotional about a stock, including feelings of anger or revenge, trade small. Many people who hit it big in the market can’t help but make bigger and bigger bets. Just like the gamblers at a casino, they keep trading until all their money is gone.</p>\n<p>You don’t think it can happen to you? One of the greatest speculators in the world, Jesse Livermore, made $100 million dollars in a single week in 1929. He then lost all of his money within five years. He should have moved most of his profits out of the market after his big win and traded small for the next year. Instead, he got reckless and lost it all.</p>\n<p><b>12. Don’t take on too much risk:</b>Never invest or trade with so much money that if you lost, you’d lose your house or 401(k). Brokers told me about clients who cleared out their retirement funds or took cash advances on their credit cards so they could buy GameStop and AMC. Some won, some lost, but many took on way too much risk.</p>\n<p><b>The meme-stock pyramid scheme</b></p>\n<p>Those who traded GameStop, AMC and other meme stocks thought they were trading, but they were actually participating in a gigantic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early and got out early probably did well. Those who entered late or held too long lost money.</p>\n<p>My advice: Review these 12 rules periodically. They are based on the experiences and the bad luck of thousands of other traders, including myself, who thought we were smarter than the market. In truth the market was smarter than us — because it always is.</p>","source":"market_watch","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>These 12 lessons from the GameStop and AMC frenzy can help you make money trading stocks (or at least lose less)</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nThese 12 lessons from the GameStop and AMC frenzy can help you make money trading stocks (or at least lose less)\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-02-09 17:52 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-12-lessons-from-the-gamestop-and-amc-frenzy-can-help-you-make-money-trading-stocks-or-at-least-lose-less-11612771522?mod=home-page><strong>MarketWatch</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>I can hear the cries from investors who racked up huge profits in GameStop or AMC Entertainment Holdings for a few hours or days, only to watch their gains evaporate.\nThis coordinated bull raid was ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-12-lessons-from-the-gamestop-and-amc-frenzy-can-help-you-make-money-trading-stocks-or-at-least-lose-less-11612771522?mod=home-page\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{".DJI":"道琼斯","GME":"游戏驿站",".IXIC":"NASDAQ Composite","AMC":"AMC院线",".SPX":"S&P 500 Index"},"source_url":"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-12-lessons-from-the-gamestop-and-amc-frenzy-can-help-you-make-money-trading-stocks-or-at-least-lose-less-11612771522?mod=home-page","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/599a65733b8245fcf7868668ef9ad712","article_id":"1149038980","content_text":"I can hear the cries from investors who racked up huge profits in GameStop or AMC Entertainment Holdings for a few hours or days, only to watch their gains evaporate.\nThis coordinated bull raid was initiated by thousands of retail investors on Reddit, a popular website forum. We heard stories of fortunes made and lost. The ones we didn’t hear were from the folks in-between — small retail traders and investors who suffered thousands of dollars (or more) in losses.\nFor those still holding GME or AMC, or for those eager to pounce on the next volatile meme stock, I offer the following advice based on personal experience and observations. These are the lessons you must know before you ever get involved in the stock or options market (or if you are holding a winning stock or option):\n1. Don’t sell stocks or options on products you don’t own:The traders who lost the most money in GameStop and AMC were those who sold “naked” calls and puts (i.e. they sold options on stocks they didn’t own), or those who sold shares short (again, they sold shares on a stock they didn’t own). When using this extremely risky strategy, you can make a fortune if you’re right. If you’re wrong, the losses can be incalculable. In reality, some unwary traders lost tens of thousands of dollars last week on positions that cost a few thousand dollars. Once again, don’t sell anything naked unless you’re a professional, and in this case even the pros lost big on that risky bet.\n2. Sell at the “zero point.”  Here’s a rule I created: If you have huge gains that disappear and you are at the zero point (i.e. break-even), sell before you have real losses. It’s better to walk away at zero than with losses.\n3. Don’t be a stubborn seller:Why is it so hard for most traders to walk away at the zero point? Stubbornness. Many traders made huge gains last week only to watch those profits disappear. They refused to sell because they hoped to make their money back. If holding options, that’s not going to happen. (If you bought at or near the high, your money is gone. If you hold a stock, plan to wait months or even years to recover. Stubborn stockholders often end up as “stuckholders.”\n4. Take the money and run:When you are holding a stock or option position that brings outsized profits, either sell half of your holding or all of it — but get out. I call this “selling at extremes.” Sell something when the profits are beyond your wildest expectations. We all know the story of the gambler who wins big at the casino, but doesn’t leave the table until all his money is gone. Know when to walk away from the computer. Profits are fleeting, especially when volatility skyrockets.\n5.Trade small when making longshot trades (i.e. gambling):GameStop and AMC were both big gambles, and for a time the trade worked if you were long. But if you bet wrong? I spoke to a few of these traders. One lost $8,000 on a single option contract. If he had traded his normal size (30 contracts), he told me, his losses would have been more than $240,000.\n6. Don’t expect this trading frenzy to keep happening:It’s possible that a group of traders on the Reddit forum will band together for more bear- or bull raids. Except Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell are most likely creating new rules to prevent this from repeating. The Fed hates volatility and will do everything in its power to keep the markets calm. So once again, when you make big money on a trade, take the money as fast as you can — because you may not get the chance again.\n7. Stop bragging about how much money you made: Many traders who won big immediately bragged on social media (and to their jealous friends) about how much money they made on this trade. Yet the euphoric feeling they had was temporary. It usually goes away after all the money is gone. The smart (and polite) traders took their gains and kept the win to themselves\n8. Use a time stop:Time stops are not well-known or popular, but with fast-moving stocks (or when trading options), they are invaluable. In an extremely fast market, the traditional stop-limit order won’t get filled, as many of those meme-stock traders found out the hard way. Instead, after making a huge profit, set a day or time to sell. For example, you may sell the position by Friday no matter what (although selling at extremes is better — see Rule #4).\n9. Sell half or all of the position:It’s never an easy decision to know when to sell. If you sell too early, it’s annoying to watch the stock go higher. Sell too late and you lose money. Selling half of your holding is a reasonable alternative, but you must be prepared to sell the other half if the position goes against you.\n10. Don’t seek revenge when you lose money on a stock:It’s common for traders to seek revenge on a stock they lost money on. Do not fall for this emotional trap. If you lost money on a stock, let it go and move on.\n11. Trade small after you made or lost big:If you’re feeling emotional about a stock, including feelings of anger or revenge, trade small. Many people who hit it big in the market can’t help but make bigger and bigger bets. Just like the gamblers at a casino, they keep trading until all their money is gone.\nYou don’t think it can happen to you? One of the greatest speculators in the world, Jesse Livermore, made $100 million dollars in a single week in 1929. He then lost all of his money within five years. He should have moved most of his profits out of the market after his big win and traded small for the next year. Instead, he got reckless and lost it all.\n12. Don’t take on too much risk:Never invest or trade with so much money that if you lost, you’d lose your house or 401(k). Brokers told me about clients who cleared out their retirement funds or took cash advances on their credit cards so they could buy GameStop and AMC. Some won, some lost, but many took on way too much risk.\nThe meme-stock pyramid scheme\nThose who traded GameStop, AMC and other meme stocks thought they were trading, but they were actually participating in a gigantic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early and got out early probably did well. Those who entered late or held too long lost money.\nMy advice: Review these 12 rules periodically. They are based on the experiences and the bad luck of thousands of other traders, including myself, who thought we were smarter than the market. In truth the market was smarter than us — because it always is.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":91,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":383870049,"gmtCreate":1612868459481,"gmtModify":1703766028106,"author":{"id":"3566559073052068","authorId":"3566559073052068","name":"Soonjek","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e4a5e7d6a23a677ca718beaebea02a61","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3566559073052068","authorIdStr":"3566559073052068"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"👍🏻","listText":"👍🏻","text":"👍🏻","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/383870049","repostId":"1114166601","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1114166601","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1612866163,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1114166601?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-02-09 18:22","market":"us","language":"en","title":"The 30-Year Treasury Hit 2%. When Will Yields Start Hurting the Stock Market?","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1114166601","media":"Barrons","summary":"After a long grind higher in long-term Treasury yields, the 30-year climbed above 2% for the first t","content":"<p>After a long grind higher in long-term Treasury yields, the 30-year climbed above 2% for the first time since Covid-19 hit. That has investors asking when the broader trend of rising bond yields will hurt the stock market.</p><p>The central concern is that&nbsp;once Treasury yields climb high enough&nbsp;investors will want to buy safe bonds instead of stocks or high-yield debt. But it isn’t clear when that will occur, and the 30-year bond carries&nbsp;extra risk of losses as yields keep rising. When it comes to the 10-year note, a more popular benchmark<b>,</b>Wall Street consensus is hard to find:&nbsp;Strategists’ forecasts say 10-year Treasury yields may need to rise only to 1.75%, or as high as 5%, to make them more attractive than those riskier alternatives.</p><p>Yields on long-term Treasuries have been rising steadily since late August, and more quickly since Nov. 9, whenPfizerand BioNTech announced an effective Covid-19 vaccine. The 30-year yield was hovering near 2% Monday after breaching that level in morning trading—up from 1.6% before the vaccine. The benchmark 10-year yield has climbed as well, rising to 1.2% Monday from 0.8% before the vaccine.</p><p>Long-term yields had retreated from their morning highs by Monday afternoon amid concerns about Covid-19 vaccine distribution and the pace of global economic reopening, with the 10-year yield off one basis points (hundredth of a percentage point) and the 30-year yield down three basis points.</p><p>But the expectation remains for yields to keep climbing over coming weeks and months. And a key question is how high yields need to be to dent stock-market returns. Several Wall Street strategists have tackled that puzzle in recent notes.</p><p>Almost 70% of S&amp;P 500 companies pay a higher yield than the 10-year note, wrote a team led by equity strategist Savita Subramanianin a recent note. That proportion would fall to 40% if companies keep their payouts at current levels and the Treasury yield rises to 1.75% by the end of this year, they found.</p><p>That could start undermining the attractiveness of stocks as an income play; today the overall dividend yield on the S&amp;P 500 is 1.5%, higher than the 10-year Treasury payout. That has helped offset concerns about valuations that are higher than historical averages.</p><p>Yet the picture looks far better for stocks from a total-return perspective. The implied long-term return of the S&amp;P 500 is around 3%, the bank’s equity strategists wrote.</p><p>Wall Street strategists don’t expect the 10-year note to be able to challenge that return soon. In a January outlook piece,Bank of America’sinterest-rate strategists predicted that 3% will be the benchmark yield’s peak during this expansion, implying yields won’t reach those levels until the Fed starts raising interest rates. And according to some of the bank’s valuation models, all else equal, stocks will look cheap compared to Treasuries until yields rise to 5%.</p><p>More important, a 3% return from the S&amp;P 500 will still outpace akey market gauge of inflation expectations over the next decade. That indicator, called the break-even inflation rate, has been driven higher by improving growth expectations as the U.S. recovers from the Covid-19 crisis. On Monday it hit 2.2%, the highest level since 2014.</p><p>The 10-year Treasury yield, in contrast, remains below market inflation forecasts over that period, and is expected to stay that way through the end of this year at least. Even higher inflation-adjusted yields may not hurt stocks, wrote Credit Suisse strategist Jonathan Golub in a Feb. 8 note, as the boost stocks get from stronger economic growth should outweigh the bond market’s relative improvement in yield.</p><p>In another positive for stocks, rising yields aren’t negatively affecting large-cap U.S. companies’ balance sheets. The effective yield on the ICE BofA Corporate Index, a gauge of current borrowing costs for high-rated companies, remains at just 1.9% for a maturity of nearly 12 years. And last year’s record-setting flood of fixed-rate borrowing means that companies won’t need to refinance their debt for years.</p><p>There is one way that rising rates are negatively affecting at least some stocks:&nbsp; Investors are less willing to wait for profit growth,Goldman Sachsstrategists wrote in a Feb. 7 note. Stocks that are sensitive to economic growth and “value” stocks that underperformed during the pandemic have outperformed since the 10-year yield climbed above 1%, they found, because investors are discounting future cash flows at a higher rate. The Russell 2000 Value ETF (IWN) has climbed 14% so far this year.</p><p>Goldman strategists wrote that a quick jump in Treasury yields would be dangerous for the stock market as a whole. But the bank estimated that real damage would require yields to rise 36 basis points in the span of a month. That looks unlikely, considering the fact that it took yields about three months to climb that far during the latest attention-grabbing move higher.</p><p>Of course, the rise in yields will likely require some changes in the way that money managers who allocate cash across different markets make their decisions, strategists and investors say. Hedge fund D.E. Shaw recently found that long-term bonds should serve as a betterhedge against declines in the stock marketas yields rise.</p><p>So bonds will likely become marginally more attractive in coming months. But it isn’t clear that such a shift will be enough to undermine stocks, especially as long-term bond returns are most at risk from rising yields. So while Treasuries could provide a better alternative to stocks some day, that process could take longer than investors might think.</p>","source":"lsy1601382232898","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>The 30-Year Treasury Hit 2%. When Will Yields Start Hurting the Stock Market?</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nThe 30-Year Treasury Hit 2%. When Will Yields Start Hurting the Stock Market?\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-02-09 18:22 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-30-year-treasury-just-hit-2-when-will-they-start-hurting-the-stock-market-51612804834?mod=hp_LEAD_1_B_3><strong>Barrons</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>After a long grind higher in long-term Treasury yields, the 30-year climbed above 2% for the first time since Covid-19 hit. That has investors asking when the broader trend of rising bond yields will ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-30-year-treasury-just-hit-2-when-will-they-start-hurting-the-stock-market-51612804834?mod=hp_LEAD_1_B_3\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{".SPX":"S&P 500 Index",".DJI":"道琼斯",".IXIC":"NASDAQ Composite"},"source_url":"https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-30-year-treasury-just-hit-2-when-will-they-start-hurting-the-stock-market-51612804834?mod=hp_LEAD_1_B_3","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1114166601","content_text":"After a long grind higher in long-term Treasury yields, the 30-year climbed above 2% for the first time since Covid-19 hit. That has investors asking when the broader trend of rising bond yields will hurt the stock market.The central concern is that once Treasury yields climb high enough investors will want to buy safe bonds instead of stocks or high-yield debt. But it isn’t clear when that will occur, and the 30-year bond carries extra risk of losses as yields keep rising. When it comes to the 10-year note, a more popular benchmark,Wall Street consensus is hard to find: Strategists’ forecasts say 10-year Treasury yields may need to rise only to 1.75%, or as high as 5%, to make them more attractive than those riskier alternatives.Yields on long-term Treasuries have been rising steadily since late August, and more quickly since Nov. 9, whenPfizerand BioNTech announced an effective Covid-19 vaccine. The 30-year yield was hovering near 2% Monday after breaching that level in morning trading—up from 1.6% before the vaccine. The benchmark 10-year yield has climbed as well, rising to 1.2% Monday from 0.8% before the vaccine.Long-term yields had retreated from their morning highs by Monday afternoon amid concerns about Covid-19 vaccine distribution and the pace of global economic reopening, with the 10-year yield off one basis points (hundredth of a percentage point) and the 30-year yield down three basis points.But the expectation remains for yields to keep climbing over coming weeks and months. And a key question is how high yields need to be to dent stock-market returns. Several Wall Street strategists have tackled that puzzle in recent notes.Almost 70% of S&P 500 companies pay a higher yield than the 10-year note, wrote a team led by equity strategist Savita Subramanianin a recent note. That proportion would fall to 40% if companies keep their payouts at current levels and the Treasury yield rises to 1.75% by the end of this year, they found.That could start undermining the attractiveness of stocks as an income play; today the overall dividend yield on the S&P 500 is 1.5%, higher than the 10-year Treasury payout. That has helped offset concerns about valuations that are higher than historical averages.Yet the picture looks far better for stocks from a total-return perspective. The implied long-term return of the S&P 500 is around 3%, the bank’s equity strategists wrote.Wall Street strategists don’t expect the 10-year note to be able to challenge that return soon. In a January outlook piece,Bank of America’sinterest-rate strategists predicted that 3% will be the benchmark yield’s peak during this expansion, implying yields won’t reach those levels until the Fed starts raising interest rates. And according to some of the bank’s valuation models, all else equal, stocks will look cheap compared to Treasuries until yields rise to 5%.More important, a 3% return from the S&P 500 will still outpace akey market gauge of inflation expectations over the next decade. That indicator, called the break-even inflation rate, has been driven higher by improving growth expectations as the U.S. recovers from the Covid-19 crisis. On Monday it hit 2.2%, the highest level since 2014.The 10-year Treasury yield, in contrast, remains below market inflation forecasts over that period, and is expected to stay that way through the end of this year at least. Even higher inflation-adjusted yields may not hurt stocks, wrote Credit Suisse strategist Jonathan Golub in a Feb. 8 note, as the boost stocks get from stronger economic growth should outweigh the bond market’s relative improvement in yield.In another positive for stocks, rising yields aren’t negatively affecting large-cap U.S. companies’ balance sheets. The effective yield on the ICE BofA Corporate Index, a gauge of current borrowing costs for high-rated companies, remains at just 1.9% for a maturity of nearly 12 years. And last year’s record-setting flood of fixed-rate borrowing means that companies won’t need to refinance their debt for years.There is one way that rising rates are negatively affecting at least some stocks:  Investors are less willing to wait for profit growth,Goldman Sachsstrategists wrote in a Feb. 7 note. Stocks that are sensitive to economic growth and “value” stocks that underperformed during the pandemic have outperformed since the 10-year yield climbed above 1%, they found, because investors are discounting future cash flows at a higher rate. The Russell 2000 Value ETF (IWN) has climbed 14% so far this year.Goldman strategists wrote that a quick jump in Treasury yields would be dangerous for the stock market as a whole. But the bank estimated that real damage would require yields to rise 36 basis points in the span of a month. That looks unlikely, considering the fact that it took yields about three months to climb that far during the latest attention-grabbing move higher.Of course, the rise in yields will likely require some changes in the way that money managers who allocate cash across different markets make their decisions, strategists and investors say. Hedge fund D.E. Shaw recently found that long-term bonds should serve as a betterhedge against declines in the stock marketas yields rise.So bonds will likely become marginally more attractive in coming months. But it isn’t clear that such a shift will be enough to undermine stocks, especially as long-term bond returns are most at risk from rising yields. So while Treasuries could provide a better alternative to stocks some day, that process could take longer than investors might think.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":147,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0}],"hots":[{"id":387520532,"gmtCreate":1613756815226,"gmtModify":1634552328197,"author":{"id":"3566559073052068","authorId":"3566559073052068","name":"Soonjek","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e4a5e7d6a23a677ca718beaebea02a61","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3566559073052068","authorIdStr":"3566559073052068"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"[呆住]&nbsp;","listText":"[呆住]&nbsp;","text":"[呆住]","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/387520532","repostId":"1161529893","repostType":4,"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":645,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"CN","totalScore":0},{"id":381574944,"gmtCreate":1612972680588,"gmtModify":1703767869945,"author":{"id":"3566559073052068","authorId":"3566559073052068","name":"Soonjek","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e4a5e7d6a23a677ca718beaebea02a61","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3566559073052068","authorIdStr":"3566559073052068"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"👍🏻","listText":"👍🏻","text":"👍🏻","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/381574944","repostId":"1113849351","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1113849351","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1612948278,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1113849351?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-02-10 17:11","market":"us","language":"en","title":"How Tesla Options Can Hedge Against A Market Meltdown","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1113849351","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nTesla's trillion dollar valuation reflects the irrational exuberance sweeping through finan","content":"<p><b>Summary</b></p>\n<ul>\n <li>Tesla's trillion dollar valuation reflects the irrational exuberance sweeping through financial markets.</li>\n <li>The bulls argue Tesla is a \"tech company\", but objective reality says Tesla is a structurally unprofitable car company.</li>\n <li>Even assuming flawless execution from here, Tesla shares face over 90% downside.</li>\n <li>This extreme downside risk makes Tesla an excellent candidate for hedging against today's mania.</li>\n <li>I detail an options trade on Tesla designed to hedge against a broader bear market.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>If you had any doubts before, thememe stock frenzyof the last few weeks should make one thing abundantly clear...</p>\n<p>Yes, it's a mania.</p>\n<p>In late December, I wrote about thespeculative excessesbubbling up in the financial markets. Things have only accelerated so far this year, with coordinated short squeezes sending the stocks of distressed businesses like GameStop (GME) and AMC (AMC) into the stratosphere,new record highs in margin debt,or my personal favorite - the relentless buying spree in speculative options among retail traders:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3ed1ad33fcdca94e8598947008f34056\" tg-width=\"785\" tg-height=\"586\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Of course, no one knows when this ends... but we all know how it ends. The recent U-turn in meme stocks thatwiped out $167 billion in a matter of daysis a preview for what awaits the broader financial markets. That's why it's never been more important to have a plan in place for hedging the downside. Some investors prefer cash or government bonds - both fine options. But for those willing to get a little more exotic, buying put options on overvalued stocks provides another alternative.</p>\n<p>First, we must identify a company with enough downside to make the bet worthwhile. And for my money, no better stock meets that criteria than electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA). From 2014 through mid-2019, Tesla shares traded in a range between $30 - $80 (split-adjusted). Then, starting in the fourth quarter of 2019, Tesla shares entered ludicrous mode - rallying 1,700% from $50 to a recent price of around $850.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/a9b909a9b8f4b39d30a319177076aeab\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"354\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>In today's article, I'll show that virtually nothing changed in Tesla's core business to justify this 17-fold increase in value since Q4 2019. I'll then make the case for why Tesla shares risk revisiting $50, even assuming an aggressive bull case in its future earnings trajectory.</p>\n<p>Given this 95% downside risk in Tesla's share price today, it makes for an excellent candidate to hedge a portfolio against the inevitable unwinding of today's mania. I'll detail a basic put option trade with more than 1,000% upside should this risk materialize going forward.</p>\n<p>Let's begin by first addressing the core thesis bulls use to justify Tesla's stratospheric valuation...</p>\n<p><b>Tesla, More than a Car Company?</b></p>\n<p>There's one simple reason why Tesla bulls need the stock narrative to reflect more just a car company: your average car company trades for less than 0.5x sales. Even Toyota, the world's most profitable mass market automaker, trades at just 0.7x sales. And then, there's Tesla...</p>\n<p>Based on a fully diluted 1.2 billion share count, Tesla currently commands a $1 trillion valuation at $850 per share. This valuation reflects a more than 30x sales multiple, or more expensive that many of the most dominant, and most profitable tech companies on the planet. The bulls argue that this valuation is justified, because Tesla is, in fact, a tech company. Why? Here's one explanation fromCleanTechnica:</p>\n<blockquote>\n What Makes Tesla a Tech Company?Tesla is creating software, a lot of software. Software is at the essence of Tesla’s unique infotainment system, user experience, and autonomous-driving features. Tesla has implemented over-the-air updates for years, while other automakers are just about to try this.\n</blockquote>\n<p>Of course, no one will deny that Tesla vehicles contain a lot of cool software and other technology (just like every other modern-day automobile). There's just one problem: each piece of software Tesla sells has a car attached to it. Examining Tesla's financials reveals no standalone software segment. In fact, 94% of Tesla’s revenue last year came from automotive sales, leasing and service. That, dear readers, makes it a car company:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/a4d1d7eb8b41fba5e2fbeb67c89ec10f\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"443\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>I'll save the analysis of Tesla's energy business for future articles, except to note that this battery/solar segment suffers even lower margins than Tesla's unprofitable car business. Back to the original point...</p>\n<p>The narrative of Tesla as a \"tech company\" is exactly that - an empty narrative, divorced from financial reality. Tesla is only a tech company in the same way that Toyota or Volkswagen are - they all produce vehicles that contain software and other advanced \"technology\". But this alone doesn’t magically transform the economics of manufacturing automobiles.</p>\n<p>And the truth is, the car business suffers from pretty dismal economics, especially compared with the software business. Perhaps more than any other single factor, it's this basic financial reality that explains why Tesla shares face 95% downside risk, even assuming perfect execution going forward. So let's explore this point in greater detail, by comparing the economics of making cars versus making software...</p>\n<p><b>Software vs Autos: A Tale of Two Industries</b></p>\n<p>The reason why dominant software companies trade at rich valuation multiples of 10-20x sales has nothing to do with so-called \"disruption\" or even innovation. Instead, it's all about the basic business fundamentals of margins, capital requirements and competitive dynamics. Let's consider the case of Microsoft, focusing on the simplified example of its Office software product (ignoring the growing cloud business and other segments for simplicity).</p>\n<p>For starters, a software product like Microsoft Office enjoys tremendous margins. After the upfront investment of developing the software code, the incremental costs of selling each additional unit are miniscule - especially in today's world of downloadable software. Compare this with producing an automobile, which comes with massive variable costs - including both input materials and labor. This critical difference in unit economics explains why software companies like Microsoft earn 30 - 40% net margins versus carmakers like Tesla that suffer from razor thin, single-digit profitability:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/4c083675b47070a5e8bd130702a838e4\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"394\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Next, let's talk competition. Given the fat margins in a product like Microsoft Office, why has no competitor emerged to steal away any meaningful market share in the last 25 years? After all, we're not exactly talking rocket science to replicate the basic Office software code. The answer is all about network effects and switching costs. The world already runs on Office products, like Excel. So if you want to share your spreadsheets with the outside world, for example, you have no choice but to use Excel. Meanwhile, who wants the hassle of learning a new spreadsheet interface, and for what upside? To save maybe $20 per year?</p>\n<p>In short, Microsoft's profitability has nothing to do with narratives like innovation or disruption. It's all about excellent unit economics combined with a virtually impenetrable moat insulating the business against competitors. This moat means Microsoft doesn't need to constantly invest money reinventing the wheel - it merely needs to maintain the status quo functionality of the Office product. So instead of diverting a big chunk of profits back into new product development, those profits instead flow back to shareholders.</p>\n<p>The mass market car business operates on the exact opposite dynamics, where consumers constantly shop around for the latest vehicle features and designs, delivered at the lowest cost. There are no meaningful competitive moats that prevent consumers from switching brands, or from competitors replicating the latest vehicle designs and technology. That's why, instead of the monopoly-like powers enjoyed by the big tech companies, the car business trends towards commoditization over time. We see evidence of this in the brutally low margins, and in the fact that no single car company owns more than 15% of global market share.</p>\n<p>Many of the bulls mistakenly view Tesla's \"first mover\" status in the EV market as some kind of fundamental competitive advantage, but that ignores the basic competitive dynamics of the car business. First mover advantage doesn't really exist in the commoditized world of auto manufacturing, and Tesla is already providing a perfect case study for those who car to look. In the world's largest EV market - Europe - Tesla's market share has collapsed from undisputed leader as recently as 2019 to third place today, thanks to a flood of new EV competition from legacy auto makers:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5c2ce6fbcf99c716e30ea76507893618\" tg-width=\"435\" tg-height=\"535\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>As the world's largest and most competitive EV market, Europe is a bellwether for the future competitive pressures Tesla will face in the U.S. and China. The success of the recently launchedFord Mustang Mach-Eshows that legacy automakers can and will produce compelling EVs on par with, or perhaps even better than Tesla's current offerings. The growing competition is showing up in another key metric:Tesla's relentless price cutsacross all vehicle models, including a$3,000 cut in the Model Y priceonly a few months after initial production.</p>\n<p>Clearly, Tesla does not enjoy any meaningful competitive moat, or else it wouldn't be surrendering market share and slashing prices across the board. That means Tesla will need to constantly invest huge sums of money just to keep its head above water earning razor thin margins, as it fights for market share in what is already becoming a highly commoditized EV industry.</p>\n<p>So to summarize...</p>\n<p><b>Tesla: It's a Car Company</b></p>\n<p>Despite the bullish narrative about the tremendous \"technology\" Tesla produces, the objective reality in the financial statements shows that Tesla is a car company which happens to produce software. It doesn't enjoy any of the economic benefits that a pure play software producer, like Microsoft enjoys - things like excellent unit economics and a monopoly-like competitive position.</p>\n<p>The reason companies like Microsoft command valuation premiums of 10x sales or more, is simply because of the high returns on invested capital the business generates. Conversely, even the most profitable car company on the planet - Toyota - trades at less than 1x sales. That's simply a reflection of the brutal economics of high operating costs and intense competitive pressures, which translate into fundamentally low returns on capital. Tesla is not immune from this basic economic reality. If you strip away the hype and just examine the numbers, Tesla looks exactly like your average car company:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/05782c8583b26edd51aeb769b32ced1d\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"408\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>But here's the thing - Tesla actually suffers far worse unit economics than your average car company. The chart above reflects the financials of a one-time outlier year of profitability. Before 2020, Tesla lost money in every year of its existence:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/07426fdf2d4f750a787924e8bc48775f\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"416\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\">Tesla's 2020 financial results led many bulls to believe the company had finally turned the corner towards sustained profitability. But here again, the objective reality in the financials tell a different story.</p>\n<p><b>Tesla Still Loses Money Making Cars</b></p>\n<p>The truth is, Tesla lost money making cars in 2020 - just like every other year in its existence. Tesla only managed to manufacture a one-time profit thanks to a bonanza in government-mandated wealth transfers from the very legacy automakers Tesla seeks to \"disrupt\". Let me explain...</p>\n<p>Governments around the globe have established regulations designed to move the auto industry away from the internal combustion engine (ICE) towards zero emission vehicles. These regulations establish a maximum emissions threshold associated with ICE vehicle sales. So companies that sell too many ICE vehicles incur fines if they exceed the emission threshold. Conversely, companies that produce zero emission vehicles - like Tesla - earn regulatory credits, which they can then sell to other manufacturers to offset the emission tallies from ICE vehicle sales.</p>\n<p>The key point here is that Tesla incurs virtually zero costs when selling these regulatory credits. This 100% pure profit margin revenue provides a major boost to Tesla's otherwise dismal financials. Last year, Tesla earned a whopping $1.6 billion in regulatory credits, up more than 150% from the $600 million earned in 2019. Now here's the thing - Tesla only grew its vehicle sales by less than 40% last year. So how do we explain the pace of emission credits massively outpacing its vehicle sales growth?</p>\n<p>One potential answer lies in Tesla's mushrooming accounts receivables balance, which grew by about half a billion dollars last year. In Tesla's10Q filing from Q3 2020, the company describes a large transaction involving regulatory credit sales that contributed to its account receivables balance:</p>\n<blockquote>\n As of September 30, 2020, one entity represented 10% or more of our total accounts receivable balance, which was related to sales of regulatory credits. As of December 31, 2019, no entity represented 10% of our total accounts receivable balance.\n</blockquote>\n<p>Unfortunately, Tesla provides few additional details explaining what's going on with the accounts receivable balance - a subjectDavid Einhorn has publicly questioned Elon Musk about. But if I were to speculate, it looks like Tesla pulled forward a substantial sum of regulatory credit sales associated with future vehicle sales into the 2020 fiscal year, allowing it to print a one-time profit of $721 million. But if we take away these credit sales (including backing out the estimated taxes paid), Tesla's \"profit\" in 2020 transforms into a $568 million loss:</p>\n<p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ac66da8f996eb6f7089a2c90e7dda12c\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"428\"><span>(Source: Author, using Tesla filings)</span></p>\n<p>In other words, Tesla's core manufacturing business remains structurally unprofitable. 2020 was not a turning point, but merely an outlier driven by a $1.6 billion bonanza in regulatory emission credits. And the language in its SEC filings indicate that at least some portion of these regulatory credit sales were pulled forward from future years and booked into the accounts receivable balance.</p>\n<p>In any event, the bottom line is clear: instead of disrupting the legacy automakers, in my view Tesla essentially relies on wealth transfers from its profitable competitors to offset the endless red ink flowing from its own manufacturing operations. Of course, the bulls might argue that it doesn't where the money comes from - profit is profit, right? But here's the problem - Tesla's corporate welfare gravy train will soon hit a brick wall, with nearly every major automaker introducingdozens of new EV modelsthis year and next. And that's just the start. By 2025, hundreds of billions of dollars will have been deployed into new EV models by legacy automakers:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/05cf0587c2addcd549edab52ba39f82f\" tg-width=\"594\" tg-height=\"386\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>The coming tsunami of new EVs offerings means regulatory emission credit supply will soar and demand will plunge, and thus killing their value. Within a few short years, Tesla will no longer be able to paper over the losses from its core business with regulatory credit sales. That's not just my opinion - Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn confirmed the temporary nature of Tesla's credit sales during the company'sQ2 2020 earnings call:</p>\n<blockquote>\n ...we don't manage the business with the assumption that regulatory credits will contribute in a significant way to the future... eventually, the stream of regulatory credits will reduce.\n</blockquote>\n<p>That means no, not all profit is created equal. An ongoing profit stream from a viable business deserves a valuation multiple. Conversely, a temporary profit stream should be looked through when assessing the long-term value of a business. Since Tesla investors can not count on regulatory credits continuing beyond the next few years, it only makes sense to strip out their impact from the income statement. When you do that, you see that virtually nothing to justify Tesla's manic share price rally in 2020 - the core manufacturing business remains structurally unprofitable:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/35bc24f3b93c083529b291bfa499d17c\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"404\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Meanwhile, it's not just the rearview financials in the core business that remain unchanged.Jim Chanos recently notedhow the forward analyst estimates for Tesla's 2022 - 2023 earnings are the same as in mid-2019, back when shares traded for $50:</p>\n<blockquote>\n That kind of tells you a little bit about what's happened in the marketplace in that valuations have just gone parabolic for basically a company that's still, in the eyes of analysts, earning at or below where they thought it would be earning two years ago. That's kind of incredible.\n</blockquote>\n<p>So if neither the trailing business fundamentals nor the forward earnings outlook changed, that leaves only one variable left to explain what sent Tesla shares from $50 to $850: investor psychology. More specifically, manic psychology, fueling a mad scramble for unprofitable companies across the board:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/92ddc266e80382c1f5544c7bf8e51828\" tg-width=\"1280\" tg-height=\"954\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Thus, Tesla's parabolic price appreciation is merely one of the countless cases of speculative excess playing out across the financial markets. Make no mistake, the coming unwind of this excess is a question of when, not if. When that day comes, the fallout will likely spread throughout financial markets, taking down the innocent bystanders as collateral damage. That's why I'm betting against Tesla as a hedge against this coming unwind. And the reason Tesla makes such a compelling candidate for a price re-rating is, well... how many other trillion dollar companies do you know of that don't make money in their core business?</p>\n<p>Take away the regulatory profit stream - which will start happening this year - and there's no reason why Tesla should trade for anything above the net cash on the balance sheet - which currently sits at around $7 billion, or about $6 per share on a fully diluted basis. Meanwhile, what's the upside case in the scenario where Tesla transforms itself into a profitable car company? Let's briefly consider that scenario...</p>\n<p>Tesla Shares Face 90% Downside, Even with Perfect Execution</p>\n<p>Let's suspend disbelief for a moment and give Tesla full credit for flawless execution on both top line growth and bottom line profitability going forward. For the top line growth assumption, let's simply use the forecast fromTesla's most recent earnings release, where the company guided for 50% annual growth rate in vehicle deliveries going forward. Before moving on, I'll simply note that this projection seems wildly optimistic given Tesla's depleted product pipeline. Both the Tesla Semi and Roadster have missed their original production deadlines by over a year, with no clear timeline yet on when production will begin. Meanwhile, the CyberTruck - Tesla's only mass market vehicle in the pipeline -also appears delayeduntil sometime between 2022 - 2023.</p>\n<p>But even if we give Tesla full credit for this growth, one thing is clear - it will require massive capital investment. That means significant future equity issuance. Meanwhile, Tesla pays a significant portion of its employee salary expense via stock compensation, including Elon Musk's record shattering$56 billion stock bonus plan(saving the planet ain't cheap, apparently). The bottom line: equity dilution is a real issue for Tesla shareholders. Over the last five years, Tesla shareholders have suffered more than 50% dilution. Given the healthy cash pile currently on the balance sheet, let's conservatively assume the dilution rate slows to 5% annually going forward, starting from today's 1.2 billion fully diluted share count.</p>\n<p>Next, let's talk earnings. Remember, this is our aggressive bull case... so let's hold nothing back. We'll assume that Tesla transforms from a structurally unprofitable automaker into one of the most profitable car companies on the planet - matching the 6% net margins earned by Toyota, the mass market industry leader in profitability.</p>\n<p>Finally, let's give Tesla a best-in-class 25x earnings multiple. That's a more than 300% valuation premium over the industry average of roughly 8x earnings, and more than twice the earnings multiple on Toyota. Putting it all together, the table below shows the key assumptions and annual price targets out to 2025:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/381ad84108e848b2bfe8fc2001b57800\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"158\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>In other words...</p>\n<p><i><b>Tesla shares face more than 90% downside risk through 2022, even in the aggressive bull case scenario.</b></i></p>\n<p>In future articles, I'll dive deeper into the weeds to show why there's very little chance of Tesla achieving anything close to the targets outlined above. For now, the key takeaway is that even these fantasy fundamentals barely justify a $50 price target.</p>\n<p>Before wrapping up this analysis and moving on to the trade idea, let me address the final key talking point bulls use to justify Tesla's trillion dollar valuation...</p>\n<p>What About the Robotaxis?</p>\n<p>Starting in late 2016,Elon Musk has promisedthe imminent release of Level 5 full self driving capability in all Tesla vehicles. The promise all along has been that, every Tesla rolling off the assembly line contained the necessary hardware for full self driving, and it was only a matter of developing the software to achieve Level 5 autonomy.</p>\n<p>As a brief bit of background, Level 5 is the highest of6 SAE-defined levels of vehicle autonomy(ranging from 0 to 5). A level 5 vehicle can fully navigate through all environments with zero human supervision. Over the last several years, Musk has made a series of autonomy promises to both consumers and investors which have so far failed to materialize. This includes a2019 capital raise, during which Musk promised a future \"robotaxi\" network that would include a million autonomous Tesla's on the road by 2020. Musk has even claimed that Tesla owners could lend their vehicles out to this future robotaxi network andearn as much as $30,000 per year.</p>\n<p>Those were the promises, but here's the reality... more than four years after making the original promise, Tesla is still stuck at Level 2 autonomy. As described in the graphic below, Level 2 autonomy is nothing more than a basic driver assistance feature, which many other automakers currently offer:</p>\n<p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f7a572a2cdf3f9b0161fb7fef5abce9f\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"415\"><span>Source (notations by author)</span></p>\n<p>Despite the endless string of autonomy promises that have gone unfulfilled for more than four years, Musk remains undeterred in continuing to make aggressive projections to investors. On the company's latest earnings, Musk talked up a forecast of $50 billion in future earnings from the non-existent robotaxi network,as CNBC reports:</p>\n<blockquote>\n On the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the valuation makes sense if you assume that billions of dollars worth of cars become robotaxis.He said $50 billion in car sales could produce another $50 billion in “incremental profit” with software margins.\n</blockquote>\n<p>In other words - ignore the broken autonomy promises over the last four years, and just assume this non-existent robotaxi network will become one of the world's most profitable businesses in the future. I'll save the full autonomy analysis for the future, except to say - if you buy into this projection, then sure, a trillion dollar valuation for Tesla stock can make sense. I'll happily take the other side of that bet.</p>\n<p>And without a miracle windfall from robotaxis, there's nothing to stop Mr. Market from repricing Tesla as the unprofitable automaker that it is when today's mania unravels. Which brings us to the final point of this article - the Tesla options trade I'm using to hedge against the unraveling of speculative excess in today's market.</p>\n<p><b>A Tesla Hedging Trade with Over 10x Upside</b></p>\n<p>The full discussion of put option mechanics goes beyond the scope of today's article, but for a high level overview, think of put options as the stock market's version of an insurance policy. Just like your monthly car insurance premiums, most put options expire worthless... but during a crash, they can pay off in a big way.</p>\n<p>Put options achieve this pay off structure by providing short exposure to 100 shares of an underlying stock at the option strike price, up until the expiration date. You pay a premium for the privilege of gaining this short exposure, in the form of the upfront price of the option contract. The reason most options expire worthless is because the stock price must move far enough below the strike price to offset the cost of the option, within a limited time frame (i.e. before the expiration date).</p>\n<p>And that brings us to the two key elements of selecting a put option: a target price and a time frame. I just explained the fundamental case for a downside target of $50 in Tesla shares. And from a technical perspective, Tesla based at around $50 in the fourth quarter of 2019 before launching into a parabolic melt-up. The history of parabolic advances says that, when they end, the stock price often revisits the launch pad - which would bring Tesla back to around $50. Meanwhile, in order to give this trade plenty of time, I'm looking out to January 2022 as a rough time frame.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3ca705542b208fa6c8afca0795f80259\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"354\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>So this time frame gives a straight forward decision on the option expiration date of January 21, 2022. Meanwhile, in order to give the position plenty of room to be wrong and still pay off, I'll select a strike price of $300. There's a delicate balance when selecting strike prices - a lower strike would provide a higher return, but also come with a lower probability of pay off. As I'll show below, selecting a $300 strike price still provides the chance of earning a decent return even if my $50 downside target proves too aggressive.</p>\n<p>But before considering the return potential, we have to know the price of the option. At the close of trading on Monday, the $300 strike Tesla put option expiring on January 21, 2022 traded for around $15.75, as shown below:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f18b6b326a4fadbe5a0dae10c0355ac6\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"38\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\"></p>\n<p>Given the 100-share multiplier, the $15.75 quoted price translates into a total cost of $1,575 (plus fees/commissions). With this information, we can determine the return potential of the option for a range of scenarios. In the case where Tesla closes at or above $300 by the expiration date, the option expires worthless, resulting in a 100% loss. Alternatively, if Tesla closes below $300, then the option gains $100 in value for every $1 below the $300 strike price. The table below summarizes this range of scenarios:</p>\n<p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/33d0ec6d30e3088aad23b0bf644728ab\" tg-width=\"453\" tg-height=\"244\"><span>(Note: for simplicity, I assume the option is held until just before the expiration date, and then closed out without exercising the contract).</span></p>\n<p>So in the downside scenario outlined earlier, where Tesla trades down to $50 by the January 2022 expiration date, the option value grows from $1,650 to $25,000 - for a gain of about 1,400%. However, even if this downside target proves too aggressive, there's still scope to make a reasonable return. If shares only fall to, say $200, the option still returns roughly 500%.</p>\n<p>As you can see, it only take a small allocation within an overall portfolio to gain substantial hedging exposure with a trade like this. Of course, recency bias might make $50 or even $200 per share seem outlandish for a stock trading near $850 today. But let's not forget that Tesla was within“single digit weeks” of bankruptcyas recently as 2018. And in May of 2019, topTesla analyst Adam Jonasdescribed the company as “a distressed credit and restructuring story”, with a $10 downside price target (or $2 pre-split).</p>\n<p>The core business remains virtually unchanged from 2018 and 2019 - when terms like \"bankruptcy\" and \"restructuring\" were on the table. The only key difference is that Tesla now enjoys a positive net cash balance, which takes an immediate bankruptcy scenario off the table. But with less than $10 per share in net cash, this should provide little consolation for the bulls as a valuation floor.</p>\n<p>All that really needs to happen is for Tesla to continue on its current path of losing money in its core business, and catastrophic downside is in store for the stock. And that's not just my opinion - Elon Musk himself fully recognizes this risk, as he noted in a recentemail to employees:</p>\n<blockquote>\n Investors are giving us a lot of credit for future profitability but if, at any point, they conclude that’s not going to happen, our stock will immediately get crushed like a souffle under a sledgehammer!\n</blockquote>\n<p>Going forward, my money's on the sledgehammer, not the soufflé.</p>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>How Tesla Options Can Hedge Against A Market Meltdown</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nHow Tesla Options Can Hedge Against A Market Meltdown\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-02-10 17:11 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4404670-how-tesla-options-can-hedge-against-market-meltdown><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nTesla's trillion dollar valuation reflects the irrational exuberance sweeping through financial markets.\nThe bulls argue Tesla is a \"tech company\", but objective reality says Tesla is a ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4404670-how-tesla-options-can-hedge-against-market-meltdown\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"TSLA":"特斯拉"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4404670-how-tesla-options-can-hedge-against-market-meltdown","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"1113849351","content_text":"Summary\n\nTesla's trillion dollar valuation reflects the irrational exuberance sweeping through financial markets.\nThe bulls argue Tesla is a \"tech company\", but objective reality says Tesla is a structurally unprofitable car company.\nEven assuming flawless execution from here, Tesla shares face over 90% downside.\nThis extreme downside risk makes Tesla an excellent candidate for hedging against today's mania.\nI detail an options trade on Tesla designed to hedge against a broader bear market.\n\nIf you had any doubts before, thememe stock frenzyof the last few weeks should make one thing abundantly clear...\nYes, it's a mania.\nIn late December, I wrote about thespeculative excessesbubbling up in the financial markets. Things have only accelerated so far this year, with coordinated short squeezes sending the stocks of distressed businesses like GameStop (GME) and AMC (AMC) into the stratosphere,new record highs in margin debt,or my personal favorite - the relentless buying spree in speculative options among retail traders:\n\nOf course, no one knows when this ends... but we all know how it ends. The recent U-turn in meme stocks thatwiped out $167 billion in a matter of daysis a preview for what awaits the broader financial markets. That's why it's never been more important to have a plan in place for hedging the downside. Some investors prefer cash or government bonds - both fine options. But for those willing to get a little more exotic, buying put options on overvalued stocks provides another alternative.\nFirst, we must identify a company with enough downside to make the bet worthwhile. And for my money, no better stock meets that criteria than electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA). From 2014 through mid-2019, Tesla shares traded in a range between $30 - $80 (split-adjusted). Then, starting in the fourth quarter of 2019, Tesla shares entered ludicrous mode - rallying 1,700% from $50 to a recent price of around $850.\n\nIn today's article, I'll show that virtually nothing changed in Tesla's core business to justify this 17-fold increase in value since Q4 2019. I'll then make the case for why Tesla shares risk revisiting $50, even assuming an aggressive bull case in its future earnings trajectory.\nGiven this 95% downside risk in Tesla's share price today, it makes for an excellent candidate to hedge a portfolio against the inevitable unwinding of today's mania. I'll detail a basic put option trade with more than 1,000% upside should this risk materialize going forward.\nLet's begin by first addressing the core thesis bulls use to justify Tesla's stratospheric valuation...\nTesla, More than a Car Company?\nThere's one simple reason why Tesla bulls need the stock narrative to reflect more just a car company: your average car company trades for less than 0.5x sales. Even Toyota, the world's most profitable mass market automaker, trades at just 0.7x sales. And then, there's Tesla...\nBased on a fully diluted 1.2 billion share count, Tesla currently commands a $1 trillion valuation at $850 per share. This valuation reflects a more than 30x sales multiple, or more expensive that many of the most dominant, and most profitable tech companies on the planet. The bulls argue that this valuation is justified, because Tesla is, in fact, a tech company. Why? Here's one explanation fromCleanTechnica:\n\n What Makes Tesla a Tech Company?Tesla is creating software, a lot of software. Software is at the essence of Tesla’s unique infotainment system, user experience, and autonomous-driving features. Tesla has implemented over-the-air updates for years, while other automakers are just about to try this.\n\nOf course, no one will deny that Tesla vehicles contain a lot of cool software and other technology (just like every other modern-day automobile). There's just one problem: each piece of software Tesla sells has a car attached to it. Examining Tesla's financials reveals no standalone software segment. In fact, 94% of Tesla’s revenue last year came from automotive sales, leasing and service. That, dear readers, makes it a car company:\n\nI'll save the analysis of Tesla's energy business for future articles, except to note that this battery/solar segment suffers even lower margins than Tesla's unprofitable car business. Back to the original point...\nThe narrative of Tesla as a \"tech company\" is exactly that - an empty narrative, divorced from financial reality. Tesla is only a tech company in the same way that Toyota or Volkswagen are - they all produce vehicles that contain software and other advanced \"technology\". But this alone doesn’t magically transform the economics of manufacturing automobiles.\nAnd the truth is, the car business suffers from pretty dismal economics, especially compared with the software business. Perhaps more than any other single factor, it's this basic financial reality that explains why Tesla shares face 95% downside risk, even assuming perfect execution going forward. So let's explore this point in greater detail, by comparing the economics of making cars versus making software...\nSoftware vs Autos: A Tale of Two Industries\nThe reason why dominant software companies trade at rich valuation multiples of 10-20x sales has nothing to do with so-called \"disruption\" or even innovation. Instead, it's all about the basic business fundamentals of margins, capital requirements and competitive dynamics. Let's consider the case of Microsoft, focusing on the simplified example of its Office software product (ignoring the growing cloud business and other segments for simplicity).\nFor starters, a software product like Microsoft Office enjoys tremendous margins. After the upfront investment of developing the software code, the incremental costs of selling each additional unit are miniscule - especially in today's world of downloadable software. Compare this with producing an automobile, which comes with massive variable costs - including both input materials and labor. This critical difference in unit economics explains why software companies like Microsoft earn 30 - 40% net margins versus carmakers like Tesla that suffer from razor thin, single-digit profitability:\n\nNext, let's talk competition. Given the fat margins in a product like Microsoft Office, why has no competitor emerged to steal away any meaningful market share in the last 25 years? After all, we're not exactly talking rocket science to replicate the basic Office software code. The answer is all about network effects and switching costs. The world already runs on Office products, like Excel. So if you want to share your spreadsheets with the outside world, for example, you have no choice but to use Excel. Meanwhile, who wants the hassle of learning a new spreadsheet interface, and for what upside? To save maybe $20 per year?\nIn short, Microsoft's profitability has nothing to do with narratives like innovation or disruption. It's all about excellent unit economics combined with a virtually impenetrable moat insulating the business against competitors. This moat means Microsoft doesn't need to constantly invest money reinventing the wheel - it merely needs to maintain the status quo functionality of the Office product. So instead of diverting a big chunk of profits back into new product development, those profits instead flow back to shareholders.\nThe mass market car business operates on the exact opposite dynamics, where consumers constantly shop around for the latest vehicle features and designs, delivered at the lowest cost. There are no meaningful competitive moats that prevent consumers from switching brands, or from competitors replicating the latest vehicle designs and technology. That's why, instead of the monopoly-like powers enjoyed by the big tech companies, the car business trends towards commoditization over time. We see evidence of this in the brutally low margins, and in the fact that no single car company owns more than 15% of global market share.\nMany of the bulls mistakenly view Tesla's \"first mover\" status in the EV market as some kind of fundamental competitive advantage, but that ignores the basic competitive dynamics of the car business. First mover advantage doesn't really exist in the commoditized world of auto manufacturing, and Tesla is already providing a perfect case study for those who car to look. In the world's largest EV market - Europe - Tesla's market share has collapsed from undisputed leader as recently as 2019 to third place today, thanks to a flood of new EV competition from legacy auto makers:\n\nAs the world's largest and most competitive EV market, Europe is a bellwether for the future competitive pressures Tesla will face in the U.S. and China. The success of the recently launchedFord Mustang Mach-Eshows that legacy automakers can and will produce compelling EVs on par with, or perhaps even better than Tesla's current offerings. The growing competition is showing up in another key metric:Tesla's relentless price cutsacross all vehicle models, including a$3,000 cut in the Model Y priceonly a few months after initial production.\nClearly, Tesla does not enjoy any meaningful competitive moat, or else it wouldn't be surrendering market share and slashing prices across the board. That means Tesla will need to constantly invest huge sums of money just to keep its head above water earning razor thin margins, as it fights for market share in what is already becoming a highly commoditized EV industry.\nSo to summarize...\nTesla: It's a Car Company\nDespite the bullish narrative about the tremendous \"technology\" Tesla produces, the objective reality in the financial statements shows that Tesla is a car company which happens to produce software. It doesn't enjoy any of the economic benefits that a pure play software producer, like Microsoft enjoys - things like excellent unit economics and a monopoly-like competitive position.\nThe reason companies like Microsoft command valuation premiums of 10x sales or more, is simply because of the high returns on invested capital the business generates. Conversely, even the most profitable car company on the planet - Toyota - trades at less than 1x sales. That's simply a reflection of the brutal economics of high operating costs and intense competitive pressures, which translate into fundamentally low returns on capital. Tesla is not immune from this basic economic reality. If you strip away the hype and just examine the numbers, Tesla looks exactly like your average car company:\n\nBut here's the thing - Tesla actually suffers far worse unit economics than your average car company. The chart above reflects the financials of a one-time outlier year of profitability. Before 2020, Tesla lost money in every year of its existence:\nTesla's 2020 financial results led many bulls to believe the company had finally turned the corner towards sustained profitability. But here again, the objective reality in the financials tell a different story.\nTesla Still Loses Money Making Cars\nThe truth is, Tesla lost money making cars in 2020 - just like every other year in its existence. Tesla only managed to manufacture a one-time profit thanks to a bonanza in government-mandated wealth transfers from the very legacy automakers Tesla seeks to \"disrupt\". Let me explain...\nGovernments around the globe have established regulations designed to move the auto industry away from the internal combustion engine (ICE) towards zero emission vehicles. These regulations establish a maximum emissions threshold associated with ICE vehicle sales. So companies that sell too many ICE vehicles incur fines if they exceed the emission threshold. Conversely, companies that produce zero emission vehicles - like Tesla - earn regulatory credits, which they can then sell to other manufacturers to offset the emission tallies from ICE vehicle sales.\nThe key point here is that Tesla incurs virtually zero costs when selling these regulatory credits. This 100% pure profit margin revenue provides a major boost to Tesla's otherwise dismal financials. Last year, Tesla earned a whopping $1.6 billion in regulatory credits, up more than 150% from the $600 million earned in 2019. Now here's the thing - Tesla only grew its vehicle sales by less than 40% last year. So how do we explain the pace of emission credits massively outpacing its vehicle sales growth?\nOne potential answer lies in Tesla's mushrooming accounts receivables balance, which grew by about half a billion dollars last year. In Tesla's10Q filing from Q3 2020, the company describes a large transaction involving regulatory credit sales that contributed to its account receivables balance:\n\n As of September 30, 2020, one entity represented 10% or more of our total accounts receivable balance, which was related to sales of regulatory credits. As of December 31, 2019, no entity represented 10% of our total accounts receivable balance.\n\nUnfortunately, Tesla provides few additional details explaining what's going on with the accounts receivable balance - a subjectDavid Einhorn has publicly questioned Elon Musk about. But if I were to speculate, it looks like Tesla pulled forward a substantial sum of regulatory credit sales associated with future vehicle sales into the 2020 fiscal year, allowing it to print a one-time profit of $721 million. But if we take away these credit sales (including backing out the estimated taxes paid), Tesla's \"profit\" in 2020 transforms into a $568 million loss:\n(Source: Author, using Tesla filings)\nIn other words, Tesla's core manufacturing business remains structurally unprofitable. 2020 was not a turning point, but merely an outlier driven by a $1.6 billion bonanza in regulatory emission credits. And the language in its SEC filings indicate that at least some portion of these regulatory credit sales were pulled forward from future years and booked into the accounts receivable balance.\nIn any event, the bottom line is clear: instead of disrupting the legacy automakers, in my view Tesla essentially relies on wealth transfers from its profitable competitors to offset the endless red ink flowing from its own manufacturing operations. Of course, the bulls might argue that it doesn't where the money comes from - profit is profit, right? But here's the problem - Tesla's corporate welfare gravy train will soon hit a brick wall, with nearly every major automaker introducingdozens of new EV modelsthis year and next. And that's just the start. By 2025, hundreds of billions of dollars will have been deployed into new EV models by legacy automakers:\n\nThe coming tsunami of new EVs offerings means regulatory emission credit supply will soar and demand will plunge, and thus killing their value. Within a few short years, Tesla will no longer be able to paper over the losses from its core business with regulatory credit sales. That's not just my opinion - Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn confirmed the temporary nature of Tesla's credit sales during the company'sQ2 2020 earnings call:\n\n ...we don't manage the business with the assumption that regulatory credits will contribute in a significant way to the future... eventually, the stream of regulatory credits will reduce.\n\nThat means no, not all profit is created equal. An ongoing profit stream from a viable business deserves a valuation multiple. Conversely, a temporary profit stream should be looked through when assessing the long-term value of a business. Since Tesla investors can not count on regulatory credits continuing beyond the next few years, it only makes sense to strip out their impact from the income statement. When you do that, you see that virtually nothing to justify Tesla's manic share price rally in 2020 - the core manufacturing business remains structurally unprofitable:\n\nMeanwhile, it's not just the rearview financials in the core business that remain unchanged.Jim Chanos recently notedhow the forward analyst estimates for Tesla's 2022 - 2023 earnings are the same as in mid-2019, back when shares traded for $50:\n\n That kind of tells you a little bit about what's happened in the marketplace in that valuations have just gone parabolic for basically a company that's still, in the eyes of analysts, earning at or below where they thought it would be earning two years ago. That's kind of incredible.\n\nSo if neither the trailing business fundamentals nor the forward earnings outlook changed, that leaves only one variable left to explain what sent Tesla shares from $50 to $850: investor psychology. More specifically, manic psychology, fueling a mad scramble for unprofitable companies across the board:\n\nThus, Tesla's parabolic price appreciation is merely one of the countless cases of speculative excess playing out across the financial markets. Make no mistake, the coming unwind of this excess is a question of when, not if. When that day comes, the fallout will likely spread throughout financial markets, taking down the innocent bystanders as collateral damage. That's why I'm betting against Tesla as a hedge against this coming unwind. And the reason Tesla makes such a compelling candidate for a price re-rating is, well... how many other trillion dollar companies do you know of that don't make money in their core business?\nTake away the regulatory profit stream - which will start happening this year - and there's no reason why Tesla should trade for anything above the net cash on the balance sheet - which currently sits at around $7 billion, or about $6 per share on a fully diluted basis. Meanwhile, what's the upside case in the scenario where Tesla transforms itself into a profitable car company? Let's briefly consider that scenario...\nTesla Shares Face 90% Downside, Even with Perfect Execution\nLet's suspend disbelief for a moment and give Tesla full credit for flawless execution on both top line growth and bottom line profitability going forward. For the top line growth assumption, let's simply use the forecast fromTesla's most recent earnings release, where the company guided for 50% annual growth rate in vehicle deliveries going forward. Before moving on, I'll simply note that this projection seems wildly optimistic given Tesla's depleted product pipeline. Both the Tesla Semi and Roadster have missed their original production deadlines by over a year, with no clear timeline yet on when production will begin. Meanwhile, the CyberTruck - Tesla's only mass market vehicle in the pipeline -also appears delayeduntil sometime between 2022 - 2023.\nBut even if we give Tesla full credit for this growth, one thing is clear - it will require massive capital investment. That means significant future equity issuance. Meanwhile, Tesla pays a significant portion of its employee salary expense via stock compensation, including Elon Musk's record shattering$56 billion stock bonus plan(saving the planet ain't cheap, apparently). The bottom line: equity dilution is a real issue for Tesla shareholders. Over the last five years, Tesla shareholders have suffered more than 50% dilution. Given the healthy cash pile currently on the balance sheet, let's conservatively assume the dilution rate slows to 5% annually going forward, starting from today's 1.2 billion fully diluted share count.\nNext, let's talk earnings. Remember, this is our aggressive bull case... so let's hold nothing back. We'll assume that Tesla transforms from a structurally unprofitable automaker into one of the most profitable car companies on the planet - matching the 6% net margins earned by Toyota, the mass market industry leader in profitability.\nFinally, let's give Tesla a best-in-class 25x earnings multiple. That's a more than 300% valuation premium over the industry average of roughly 8x earnings, and more than twice the earnings multiple on Toyota. Putting it all together, the table below shows the key assumptions and annual price targets out to 2025:\n\nIn other words...\nTesla shares face more than 90% downside risk through 2022, even in the aggressive bull case scenario.\nIn future articles, I'll dive deeper into the weeds to show why there's very little chance of Tesla achieving anything close to the targets outlined above. For now, the key takeaway is that even these fantasy fundamentals barely justify a $50 price target.\nBefore wrapping up this analysis and moving on to the trade idea, let me address the final key talking point bulls use to justify Tesla's trillion dollar valuation...\nWhat About the Robotaxis?\nStarting in late 2016,Elon Musk has promisedthe imminent release of Level 5 full self driving capability in all Tesla vehicles. The promise all along has been that, every Tesla rolling off the assembly line contained the necessary hardware for full self driving, and it was only a matter of developing the software to achieve Level 5 autonomy.\nAs a brief bit of background, Level 5 is the highest of6 SAE-defined levels of vehicle autonomy(ranging from 0 to 5). A level 5 vehicle can fully navigate through all environments with zero human supervision. Over the last several years, Musk has made a series of autonomy promises to both consumers and investors which have so far failed to materialize. This includes a2019 capital raise, during which Musk promised a future \"robotaxi\" network that would include a million autonomous Tesla's on the road by 2020. Musk has even claimed that Tesla owners could lend their vehicles out to this future robotaxi network andearn as much as $30,000 per year.\nThose were the promises, but here's the reality... more than four years after making the original promise, Tesla is still stuck at Level 2 autonomy. As described in the graphic below, Level 2 autonomy is nothing more than a basic driver assistance feature, which many other automakers currently offer:\nSource (notations by author)\nDespite the endless string of autonomy promises that have gone unfulfilled for more than four years, Musk remains undeterred in continuing to make aggressive projections to investors. On the company's latest earnings, Musk talked up a forecast of $50 billion in future earnings from the non-existent robotaxi network,as CNBC reports:\n\n On the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the valuation makes sense if you assume that billions of dollars worth of cars become robotaxis.He said $50 billion in car sales could produce another $50 billion in “incremental profit” with software margins.\n\nIn other words - ignore the broken autonomy promises over the last four years, and just assume this non-existent robotaxi network will become one of the world's most profitable businesses in the future. I'll save the full autonomy analysis for the future, except to say - if you buy into this projection, then sure, a trillion dollar valuation for Tesla stock can make sense. I'll happily take the other side of that bet.\nAnd without a miracle windfall from robotaxis, there's nothing to stop Mr. Market from repricing Tesla as the unprofitable automaker that it is when today's mania unravels. Which brings us to the final point of this article - the Tesla options trade I'm using to hedge against the unraveling of speculative excess in today's market.\nA Tesla Hedging Trade with Over 10x Upside\nThe full discussion of put option mechanics goes beyond the scope of today's article, but for a high level overview, think of put options as the stock market's version of an insurance policy. Just like your monthly car insurance premiums, most put options expire worthless... but during a crash, they can pay off in a big way.\nPut options achieve this pay off structure by providing short exposure to 100 shares of an underlying stock at the option strike price, up until the expiration date. You pay a premium for the privilege of gaining this short exposure, in the form of the upfront price of the option contract. The reason most options expire worthless is because the stock price must move far enough below the strike price to offset the cost of the option, within a limited time frame (i.e. before the expiration date).\nAnd that brings us to the two key elements of selecting a put option: a target price and a time frame. I just explained the fundamental case for a downside target of $50 in Tesla shares. And from a technical perspective, Tesla based at around $50 in the fourth quarter of 2019 before launching into a parabolic melt-up. The history of parabolic advances says that, when they end, the stock price often revisits the launch pad - which would bring Tesla back to around $50. Meanwhile, in order to give this trade plenty of time, I'm looking out to January 2022 as a rough time frame.\n\nSo this time frame gives a straight forward decision on the option expiration date of January 21, 2022. Meanwhile, in order to give the position plenty of room to be wrong and still pay off, I'll select a strike price of $300. There's a delicate balance when selecting strike prices - a lower strike would provide a higher return, but also come with a lower probability of pay off. As I'll show below, selecting a $300 strike price still provides the chance of earning a decent return even if my $50 downside target proves too aggressive.\nBut before considering the return potential, we have to know the price of the option. At the close of trading on Monday, the $300 strike Tesla put option expiring on January 21, 2022 traded for around $15.75, as shown below:\n\nGiven the 100-share multiplier, the $15.75 quoted price translates into a total cost of $1,575 (plus fees/commissions). With this information, we can determine the return potential of the option for a range of scenarios. In the case where Tesla closes at or above $300 by the expiration date, the option expires worthless, resulting in a 100% loss. Alternatively, if Tesla closes below $300, then the option gains $100 in value for every $1 below the $300 strike price. The table below summarizes this range of scenarios:\n(Note: for simplicity, I assume the option is held until just before the expiration date, and then closed out without exercising the contract).\nSo in the downside scenario outlined earlier, where Tesla trades down to $50 by the January 2022 expiration date, the option value grows from $1,650 to $25,000 - for a gain of about 1,400%. However, even if this downside target proves too aggressive, there's still scope to make a reasonable return. If shares only fall to, say $200, the option still returns roughly 500%.\nAs you can see, it only take a small allocation within an overall portfolio to gain substantial hedging exposure with a trade like this. Of course, recency bias might make $50 or even $200 per share seem outlandish for a stock trading near $850 today. But let's not forget that Tesla was within“single digit weeks” of bankruptcyas recently as 2018. And in May of 2019, topTesla analyst Adam Jonasdescribed the company as “a distressed credit and restructuring story”, with a $10 downside price target (or $2 pre-split).\nThe core business remains virtually unchanged from 2018 and 2019 - when terms like \"bankruptcy\" and \"restructuring\" were on the table. The only key difference is that Tesla now enjoys a positive net cash balance, which takes an immediate bankruptcy scenario off the table. But with less than $10 per share in net cash, this should provide little consolation for the bulls as a valuation floor.\nAll that really needs to happen is for Tesla to continue on its current path of losing money in its core business, and catastrophic downside is in store for the stock. And that's not just my opinion - Elon Musk himself fully recognizes this risk, as he noted in a recentemail to employees:\n\n Investors are giving us a lot of credit for future profitability but if, at any point, they conclude that’s not going to happen, our stock will immediately get crushed like a souffle under a sledgehammer!\n\nGoing forward, my money's on the sledgehammer, not the soufflé.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":64,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":383870775,"gmtCreate":1612868491297,"gmtModify":1703766029309,"author":{"id":"3566559073052068","authorId":"3566559073052068","name":"Soonjek","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e4a5e7d6a23a677ca718beaebea02a61","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3566559073052068","authorIdStr":"3566559073052068"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"👍🏻","listText":"👍🏻","text":"👍🏻","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/383870775","repostId":"1149038980","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1149038980","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1612864337,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1149038980?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-02-09 17:52","market":"us","language":"en","title":"These 12 lessons from the GameStop and AMC frenzy can help you make money trading stocks (or at least lose less)","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1149038980","media":"MarketWatch","summary":"I can hear the cries from investors who racked up huge profits in GameStop or AMC Entertainment Hold","content":"<p>I can hear the cries from investors who racked up huge profits in GameStop&nbsp;or AMC Entertainment Holdings&nbsp;for a few hours or days, only to watch their gains evaporate.</p>\n<p>This coordinated bull raid was initiated by thousands of retail investors on Reddit, a popular website forum. We heard stories of fortunes made and lost. The ones we didn’t hear were from the folks in-between — small retail traders and investors who suffered thousands of dollars (or more) in losses.</p>\n<p>For those still holding GME or AMC, or for those eager to pounce on the next volatile meme stock, I offer the following advice based on personal experience and observations. These are the lessons you must know before you ever get involved in the stock or options market (or if you are holding a winning stock or option):</p>\n<p><b>1. Don’t sell stocks or options on products you don’t own:</b>The traders who lost the most money in GameStop and AMC were those who sold “naked” calls and puts (i.e. they sold options on stocks they didn’t own), or those who sold shares short (again, they sold shares on a stock they didn’t own). When using this extremely risky strategy, you can make a fortune if you’re right. If you’re wrong, the losses can be incalculable. In reality, some unwary traders lost tens of thousands of dollars last week on positions that cost a few thousand dollars. Once again, don’t sell anything naked unless you’re a professional, and in this case even the pros lost big on that risky bet.</p>\n<p><b>2. Sell at the “zero point.”</b>&nbsp; Here’s a rule I created: If you have huge gains that disappear and you are at the zero point (i.e. break-even), sell before you have real losses. It’s better to walk away at zero than with losses.</p>\n<p><b>3. Don’t be a stubborn seller:</b>Why is it so hard for most traders to walk away at the zero point? Stubbornness. Many traders made huge gains last week only to watch those profits disappear. They refused to sell because they hoped to make their money back. If holding options, that’s not going to happen. (If you bought at or near the high, your money is gone. If you hold a stock, plan to wait months or even years to recover. Stubborn stockholders often end up as “stuckholders.”</p>\n<p><b>4. Take the money and run:</b>When you are holding a stock or option position that brings outsized profits, either sell half of your holding or all of it — but get out. I call this “selling at extremes.” Sell something when the profits are beyond your wildest expectations. We all know the story of the gambler who wins big at the casino, but doesn’t leave the table until all his money is gone. Know when to walk away from the computer. Profits are fleeting, especially when volatility skyrockets.</p>\n<p><b>5.Trade small when making longshot trades (i.e. gambling):</b>GameStop and AMC were both big gambles, and for a time the trade worked if you were long. But if you bet wrong? I spoke to a few of these traders. One lost $8,000 on a single option contract. If he had traded his normal size (30 contracts), he told me, his losses would have been more than $240,000.</p>\n<p><b>6. Don’t expect this trading frenzy to keep happening:</b>It’s possible that a group of traders on the Reddit forum will band together for more bear- or bull raids. Except Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell are most likely creating new rules to prevent this from repeating. The Fed hates volatility and will do everything in its power to keep the markets calm. So once again, when you make big money on a trade, take the money as fast as you can — because you may not get the chance again.</p>\n<p><b>7. Stop bragging about how much money you made</b>: Many traders who won big immediately bragged on social media (and to their jealous friends) about how much money they made on this trade. Yet the euphoric feeling they had was temporary. It usually goes away after all the money is gone. The smart (and polite) traders took their gains and kept the win to themselves</p>\n<p><b>8. Use a time stop:</b>Time stops are not well-known or popular, but with fast-moving stocks (or when trading options), they are invaluable. In an extremely fast market, the traditional stop-limit order won’t get filled, as many of those meme-stock traders found out the hard way. Instead, after making a huge profit, set a day or time to sell. For example, you may sell the position by Friday no matter what (although selling at extremes is better — see Rule #4).</p>\n<p><b>9. Sell half or all of the position:</b>It’s never an easy decision to know when to sell. If you sell too early, it’s annoying to watch the stock go higher. Sell too late and you lose money. Selling half of your holding is a reasonable alternative, but you must be prepared to sell the other half if the position goes against you.</p>\n<p><b>10. Don’t seek revenge when you lose money on a stock:</b>It’s common for traders to seek revenge on a stock they lost money on. Do not fall for this emotional trap. If you lost money on a stock, let it go and move on.</p>\n<p><b>11. Trade small after you made or lost big:</b>If you’re feeling emotional about a stock, including feelings of anger or revenge, trade small. Many people who hit it big in the market can’t help but make bigger and bigger bets. Just like the gamblers at a casino, they keep trading until all their money is gone.</p>\n<p>You don’t think it can happen to you? One of the greatest speculators in the world, Jesse Livermore, made $100 million dollars in a single week in 1929. He then lost all of his money within five years. He should have moved most of his profits out of the market after his big win and traded small for the next year. Instead, he got reckless and lost it all.</p>\n<p><b>12. Don’t take on too much risk:</b>Never invest or trade with so much money that if you lost, you’d lose your house or 401(k). Brokers told me about clients who cleared out their retirement funds or took cash advances on their credit cards so they could buy GameStop and AMC. Some won, some lost, but many took on way too much risk.</p>\n<p><b>The meme-stock pyramid scheme</b></p>\n<p>Those who traded GameStop, AMC and other meme stocks thought they were trading, but they were actually participating in a gigantic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early and got out early probably did well. Those who entered late or held too long lost money.</p>\n<p>My advice: Review these 12 rules periodically. They are based on the experiences and the bad luck of thousands of other traders, including myself, who thought we were smarter than the market. In truth the market was smarter than us — because it always is.</p>","source":"market_watch","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>These 12 lessons from the GameStop and AMC frenzy can help you make money trading stocks (or at least lose less)</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nThese 12 lessons from the GameStop and AMC frenzy can help you make money trading stocks (or at least lose less)\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-02-09 17:52 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-12-lessons-from-the-gamestop-and-amc-frenzy-can-help-you-make-money-trading-stocks-or-at-least-lose-less-11612771522?mod=home-page><strong>MarketWatch</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>I can hear the cries from investors who racked up huge profits in GameStop or AMC Entertainment Holdings for a few hours or days, only to watch their gains evaporate.\nThis coordinated bull raid was ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-12-lessons-from-the-gamestop-and-amc-frenzy-can-help-you-make-money-trading-stocks-or-at-least-lose-less-11612771522?mod=home-page\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{".DJI":"道琼斯","GME":"游戏驿站",".IXIC":"NASDAQ Composite","AMC":"AMC院线",".SPX":"S&P 500 Index"},"source_url":"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-12-lessons-from-the-gamestop-and-amc-frenzy-can-help-you-make-money-trading-stocks-or-at-least-lose-less-11612771522?mod=home-page","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/599a65733b8245fcf7868668ef9ad712","article_id":"1149038980","content_text":"I can hear the cries from investors who racked up huge profits in GameStop or AMC Entertainment Holdings for a few hours or days, only to watch their gains evaporate.\nThis coordinated bull raid was initiated by thousands of retail investors on Reddit, a popular website forum. We heard stories of fortunes made and lost. The ones we didn’t hear were from the folks in-between — small retail traders and investors who suffered thousands of dollars (or more) in losses.\nFor those still holding GME or AMC, or for those eager to pounce on the next volatile meme stock, I offer the following advice based on personal experience and observations. These are the lessons you must know before you ever get involved in the stock or options market (or if you are holding a winning stock or option):\n1. Don’t sell stocks or options on products you don’t own:The traders who lost the most money in GameStop and AMC were those who sold “naked” calls and puts (i.e. they sold options on stocks they didn’t own), or those who sold shares short (again, they sold shares on a stock they didn’t own). When using this extremely risky strategy, you can make a fortune if you’re right. If you’re wrong, the losses can be incalculable. In reality, some unwary traders lost tens of thousands of dollars last week on positions that cost a few thousand dollars. Once again, don’t sell anything naked unless you’re a professional, and in this case even the pros lost big on that risky bet.\n2. Sell at the “zero point.”  Here’s a rule I created: If you have huge gains that disappear and you are at the zero point (i.e. break-even), sell before you have real losses. It’s better to walk away at zero than with losses.\n3. Don’t be a stubborn seller:Why is it so hard for most traders to walk away at the zero point? Stubbornness. Many traders made huge gains last week only to watch those profits disappear. They refused to sell because they hoped to make their money back. If holding options, that’s not going to happen. (If you bought at or near the high, your money is gone. If you hold a stock, plan to wait months or even years to recover. Stubborn stockholders often end up as “stuckholders.”\n4. Take the money and run:When you are holding a stock or option position that brings outsized profits, either sell half of your holding or all of it — but get out. I call this “selling at extremes.” Sell something when the profits are beyond your wildest expectations. We all know the story of the gambler who wins big at the casino, but doesn’t leave the table until all his money is gone. Know when to walk away from the computer. Profits are fleeting, especially when volatility skyrockets.\n5.Trade small when making longshot trades (i.e. gambling):GameStop and AMC were both big gambles, and for a time the trade worked if you were long. But if you bet wrong? I spoke to a few of these traders. One lost $8,000 on a single option contract. If he had traded his normal size (30 contracts), he told me, his losses would have been more than $240,000.\n6. Don’t expect this trading frenzy to keep happening:It’s possible that a group of traders on the Reddit forum will band together for more bear- or bull raids. Except Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell are most likely creating new rules to prevent this from repeating. The Fed hates volatility and will do everything in its power to keep the markets calm. So once again, when you make big money on a trade, take the money as fast as you can — because you may not get the chance again.\n7. Stop bragging about how much money you made: Many traders who won big immediately bragged on social media (and to their jealous friends) about how much money they made on this trade. Yet the euphoric feeling they had was temporary. It usually goes away after all the money is gone. The smart (and polite) traders took their gains and kept the win to themselves\n8. Use a time stop:Time stops are not well-known or popular, but with fast-moving stocks (or when trading options), they are invaluable. In an extremely fast market, the traditional stop-limit order won’t get filled, as many of those meme-stock traders found out the hard way. Instead, after making a huge profit, set a day or time to sell. For example, you may sell the position by Friday no matter what (although selling at extremes is better — see Rule #4).\n9. Sell half or all of the position:It’s never an easy decision to know when to sell. If you sell too early, it’s annoying to watch the stock go higher. Sell too late and you lose money. Selling half of your holding is a reasonable alternative, but you must be prepared to sell the other half if the position goes against you.\n10. Don’t seek revenge when you lose money on a stock:It’s common for traders to seek revenge on a stock they lost money on. Do not fall for this emotional trap. If you lost money on a stock, let it go and move on.\n11. Trade small after you made or lost big:If you’re feeling emotional about a stock, including feelings of anger or revenge, trade small. Many people who hit it big in the market can’t help but make bigger and bigger bets. Just like the gamblers at a casino, they keep trading until all their money is gone.\nYou don’t think it can happen to you? One of the greatest speculators in the world, Jesse Livermore, made $100 million dollars in a single week in 1929. He then lost all of his money within five years. He should have moved most of his profits out of the market after his big win and traded small for the next year. Instead, he got reckless and lost it all.\n12. Don’t take on too much risk:Never invest or trade with so much money that if you lost, you’d lose your house or 401(k). Brokers told me about clients who cleared out their retirement funds or took cash advances on their credit cards so they could buy GameStop and AMC. Some won, some lost, but many took on way too much risk.\nThe meme-stock pyramid scheme\nThose who traded GameStop, AMC and other meme stocks thought they were trading, but they were actually participating in a gigantic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early and got out early probably did well. Those who entered late or held too long lost money.\nMy advice: Review these 12 rules periodically. They are based on the experiences and the bad luck of thousands of other traders, including myself, who thought we were smarter than the market. In truth the market was smarter than us — because it always is.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":91,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":383870049,"gmtCreate":1612868459481,"gmtModify":1703766028106,"author":{"id":"3566559073052068","authorId":"3566559073052068","name":"Soonjek","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e4a5e7d6a23a677ca718beaebea02a61","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3566559073052068","authorIdStr":"3566559073052068"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"👍🏻","listText":"👍🏻","text":"👍🏻","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/383870049","repostId":"1114166601","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1114166601","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1612866163,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1114166601?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-02-09 18:22","market":"us","language":"en","title":"The 30-Year Treasury Hit 2%. When Will Yields Start Hurting the Stock Market?","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1114166601","media":"Barrons","summary":"After a long grind higher in long-term Treasury yields, the 30-year climbed above 2% for the first t","content":"<p>After a long grind higher in long-term Treasury yields, the 30-year climbed above 2% for the first time since Covid-19 hit. That has investors asking when the broader trend of rising bond yields will hurt the stock market.</p><p>The central concern is that&nbsp;once Treasury yields climb high enough&nbsp;investors will want to buy safe bonds instead of stocks or high-yield debt. But it isn’t clear when that will occur, and the 30-year bond carries&nbsp;extra risk of losses as yields keep rising. When it comes to the 10-year note, a more popular benchmark<b>,</b>Wall Street consensus is hard to find:&nbsp;Strategists’ forecasts say 10-year Treasury yields may need to rise only to 1.75%, or as high as 5%, to make them more attractive than those riskier alternatives.</p><p>Yields on long-term Treasuries have been rising steadily since late August, and more quickly since Nov. 9, whenPfizerand BioNTech announced an effective Covid-19 vaccine. The 30-year yield was hovering near 2% Monday after breaching that level in morning trading—up from 1.6% before the vaccine. The benchmark 10-year yield has climbed as well, rising to 1.2% Monday from 0.8% before the vaccine.</p><p>Long-term yields had retreated from their morning highs by Monday afternoon amid concerns about Covid-19 vaccine distribution and the pace of global economic reopening, with the 10-year yield off one basis points (hundredth of a percentage point) and the 30-year yield down three basis points.</p><p>But the expectation remains for yields to keep climbing over coming weeks and months. And a key question is how high yields need to be to dent stock-market returns. Several Wall Street strategists have tackled that puzzle in recent notes.</p><p>Almost 70% of S&amp;P 500 companies pay a higher yield than the 10-year note, wrote a team led by equity strategist Savita Subramanianin a recent note. That proportion would fall to 40% if companies keep their payouts at current levels and the Treasury yield rises to 1.75% by the end of this year, they found.</p><p>That could start undermining the attractiveness of stocks as an income play; today the overall dividend yield on the S&amp;P 500 is 1.5%, higher than the 10-year Treasury payout. That has helped offset concerns about valuations that are higher than historical averages.</p><p>Yet the picture looks far better for stocks from a total-return perspective. The implied long-term return of the S&amp;P 500 is around 3%, the bank’s equity strategists wrote.</p><p>Wall Street strategists don’t expect the 10-year note to be able to challenge that return soon. In a January outlook piece,Bank of America’sinterest-rate strategists predicted that 3% will be the benchmark yield’s peak during this expansion, implying yields won’t reach those levels until the Fed starts raising interest rates. And according to some of the bank’s valuation models, all else equal, stocks will look cheap compared to Treasuries until yields rise to 5%.</p><p>More important, a 3% return from the S&amp;P 500 will still outpace akey market gauge of inflation expectations over the next decade. That indicator, called the break-even inflation rate, has been driven higher by improving growth expectations as the U.S. recovers from the Covid-19 crisis. On Monday it hit 2.2%, the highest level since 2014.</p><p>The 10-year Treasury yield, in contrast, remains below market inflation forecasts over that period, and is expected to stay that way through the end of this year at least. Even higher inflation-adjusted yields may not hurt stocks, wrote Credit Suisse strategist Jonathan Golub in a Feb. 8 note, as the boost stocks get from stronger economic growth should outweigh the bond market’s relative improvement in yield.</p><p>In another positive for stocks, rising yields aren’t negatively affecting large-cap U.S. companies’ balance sheets. The effective yield on the ICE BofA Corporate Index, a gauge of current borrowing costs for high-rated companies, remains at just 1.9% for a maturity of nearly 12 years. And last year’s record-setting flood of fixed-rate borrowing means that companies won’t need to refinance their debt for years.</p><p>There is one way that rising rates are negatively affecting at least some stocks:&nbsp; Investors are less willing to wait for profit growth,Goldman Sachsstrategists wrote in a Feb. 7 note. Stocks that are sensitive to economic growth and “value” stocks that underperformed during the pandemic have outperformed since the 10-year yield climbed above 1%, they found, because investors are discounting future cash flows at a higher rate. The Russell 2000 Value ETF (IWN) has climbed 14% so far this year.</p><p>Goldman strategists wrote that a quick jump in Treasury yields would be dangerous for the stock market as a whole. But the bank estimated that real damage would require yields to rise 36 basis points in the span of a month. That looks unlikely, considering the fact that it took yields about three months to climb that far during the latest attention-grabbing move higher.</p><p>Of course, the rise in yields will likely require some changes in the way that money managers who allocate cash across different markets make their decisions, strategists and investors say. Hedge fund D.E. Shaw recently found that long-term bonds should serve as a betterhedge against declines in the stock marketas yields rise.</p><p>So bonds will likely become marginally more attractive in coming months. But it isn’t clear that such a shift will be enough to undermine stocks, especially as long-term bond returns are most at risk from rising yields. So while Treasuries could provide a better alternative to stocks some day, that process could take longer than investors might think.</p>","source":"lsy1601382232898","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>The 30-Year Treasury Hit 2%. When Will Yields Start Hurting the Stock Market?</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nThe 30-Year Treasury Hit 2%. When Will Yields Start Hurting the Stock Market?\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-02-09 18:22 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-30-year-treasury-just-hit-2-when-will-they-start-hurting-the-stock-market-51612804834?mod=hp_LEAD_1_B_3><strong>Barrons</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>After a long grind higher in long-term Treasury yields, the 30-year climbed above 2% for the first time since Covid-19 hit. That has investors asking when the broader trend of rising bond yields will ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-30-year-treasury-just-hit-2-when-will-they-start-hurting-the-stock-market-51612804834?mod=hp_LEAD_1_B_3\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{".SPX":"S&P 500 Index",".DJI":"道琼斯",".IXIC":"NASDAQ Composite"},"source_url":"https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-30-year-treasury-just-hit-2-when-will-they-start-hurting-the-stock-market-51612804834?mod=hp_LEAD_1_B_3","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1114166601","content_text":"After a long grind higher in long-term Treasury yields, the 30-year climbed above 2% for the first time since Covid-19 hit. That has investors asking when the broader trend of rising bond yields will hurt the stock market.The central concern is that once Treasury yields climb high enough investors will want to buy safe bonds instead of stocks or high-yield debt. But it isn’t clear when that will occur, and the 30-year bond carries extra risk of losses as yields keep rising. When it comes to the 10-year note, a more popular benchmark,Wall Street consensus is hard to find: Strategists’ forecasts say 10-year Treasury yields may need to rise only to 1.75%, or as high as 5%, to make them more attractive than those riskier alternatives.Yields on long-term Treasuries have been rising steadily since late August, and more quickly since Nov. 9, whenPfizerand BioNTech announced an effective Covid-19 vaccine. The 30-year yield was hovering near 2% Monday after breaching that level in morning trading—up from 1.6% before the vaccine. The benchmark 10-year yield has climbed as well, rising to 1.2% Monday from 0.8% before the vaccine.Long-term yields had retreated from their morning highs by Monday afternoon amid concerns about Covid-19 vaccine distribution and the pace of global economic reopening, with the 10-year yield off one basis points (hundredth of a percentage point) and the 30-year yield down three basis points.But the expectation remains for yields to keep climbing over coming weeks and months. And a key question is how high yields need to be to dent stock-market returns. Several Wall Street strategists have tackled that puzzle in recent notes.Almost 70% of S&P 500 companies pay a higher yield than the 10-year note, wrote a team led by equity strategist Savita Subramanianin a recent note. That proportion would fall to 40% if companies keep their payouts at current levels and the Treasury yield rises to 1.75% by the end of this year, they found.That could start undermining the attractiveness of stocks as an income play; today the overall dividend yield on the S&P 500 is 1.5%, higher than the 10-year Treasury payout. That has helped offset concerns about valuations that are higher than historical averages.Yet the picture looks far better for stocks from a total-return perspective. The implied long-term return of the S&P 500 is around 3%, the bank’s equity strategists wrote.Wall Street strategists don’t expect the 10-year note to be able to challenge that return soon. In a January outlook piece,Bank of America’sinterest-rate strategists predicted that 3% will be the benchmark yield’s peak during this expansion, implying yields won’t reach those levels until the Fed starts raising interest rates. And according to some of the bank’s valuation models, all else equal, stocks will look cheap compared to Treasuries until yields rise to 5%.More important, a 3% return from the S&P 500 will still outpace akey market gauge of inflation expectations over the next decade. That indicator, called the break-even inflation rate, has been driven higher by improving growth expectations as the U.S. recovers from the Covid-19 crisis. On Monday it hit 2.2%, the highest level since 2014.The 10-year Treasury yield, in contrast, remains below market inflation forecasts over that period, and is expected to stay that way through the end of this year at least. Even higher inflation-adjusted yields may not hurt stocks, wrote Credit Suisse strategist Jonathan Golub in a Feb. 8 note, as the boost stocks get from stronger economic growth should outweigh the bond market’s relative improvement in yield.In another positive for stocks, rising yields aren’t negatively affecting large-cap U.S. companies’ balance sheets. The effective yield on the ICE BofA Corporate Index, a gauge of current borrowing costs for high-rated companies, remains at just 1.9% for a maturity of nearly 12 years. And last year’s record-setting flood of fixed-rate borrowing means that companies won’t need to refinance their debt for years.There is one way that rising rates are negatively affecting at least some stocks:  Investors are less willing to wait for profit growth,Goldman Sachsstrategists wrote in a Feb. 7 note. Stocks that are sensitive to economic growth and “value” stocks that underperformed during the pandemic have outperformed since the 10-year yield climbed above 1%, they found, because investors are discounting future cash flows at a higher rate. The Russell 2000 Value ETF (IWN) has climbed 14% so far this year.Goldman strategists wrote that a quick jump in Treasury yields would be dangerous for the stock market as a whole. But the bank estimated that real damage would require yields to rise 36 basis points in the span of a month. That looks unlikely, considering the fact that it took yields about three months to climb that far during the latest attention-grabbing move higher.Of course, the rise in yields will likely require some changes in the way that money managers who allocate cash across different markets make their decisions, strategists and investors say. Hedge fund D.E. Shaw recently found that long-term bonds should serve as a betterhedge against declines in the stock marketas yields rise.So bonds will likely become marginally more attractive in coming months. But it isn’t clear that such a shift will be enough to undermine stocks, especially as long-term bond returns are most at risk from rising yields. So while Treasuries could provide a better alternative to stocks some day, that process could take longer than investors might think.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":147,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0}],"lives":[]}